Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 senior sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business 6 months. COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

Startup 227

Startup Venture Capital Sales Course 227

Berkonomics

FEBRUARY 27, 2014

I never took a business course, never wrote a business plan, and never raised any outside capital. My sales tax payments were due in the next few days, and I didn’t have the money. But I did have an appointment, a sales opportunity the next morning. I made the sale, and paid my debts. But there’s more.

Startup 204

Startup Software Review UCLA Sales 204

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2011

I find it amusing when a journalist writes an article about a prominent startup (either privately held or preparing for an IPO) and decries that, “They’re not even profitable!” The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

Startup 418

Startup Venture Capital Sales Technical Review 418

Berkonomics

APRIL 3, 2014

Angel Capital Association (ACA) lists over four hundred member groups, located throughout the country. The European Business Angel Network (EBAN), and similar organizations in other countries including Canada, all have web sites with directories of angel groups that are local to you.

Equity 232

Equity Startup Organization Invest 232

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 19, 2010

I’m writing this post as part of my series with Advice on Raising Venture Capital but will file it under Sales Tips as well since it applies equally to both scenarios. This is true whether your at a sales meeting or at a VC firm. This happens often is sales meetings or VC meetings. Congratulations.

Venture Capital 318

Venture Capital Startup Sales Writing 318

TechCrunch LA

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

Bain Capital Ventures' Jamison Hill. We are in phase three of the influencer economy,” Bain Capital Ventures senior principal Jamison Hill, who led the firm’s investment in the influencer shoutout marketplace Cameo , tells TechCrunch. Podfund , for example, writes checks sized between $25,000 to $50,000 to emerging podcasters.

Platform 170

Platform Marketing Tool Venture Capital 170

socalTECH

JANUARY 18, 2011

What that did, is it helped us to expand the service to help publishers do the following: identify what content to write, how to distribute that content to various mediums, and how to monetize that content. Journalists are notorious for not wanting to write based on revenues or commercial intersts, or having anyone tell them what to write.

Marketing 232

Marketing Funding Content Writing 232

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 24, 2019

you can build that with your personal peer network. I was a SaaS company and he had been on the Executive Board and the Strategy Council for Larry Ellison at Oracle and he taught me some key lessons about sales and he served as a useful buffer between my investors and me. But if they could even write $2,500?—?money

Startup 187

Startup Writing Venture Capital Oracle 187

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2009

This is a story of one of the risks of venture capital. But some companies have entrepreneurs that seem talented on paper, are in a space that seems interesting to investors and are able to raise venture capital early in the company’s existence. Our first big round of venture capital (our A round) was a whopping $16.5

Startup 299

Startup Venture Capital Technical Review Training 299

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 2, 2011

Thiel is providing his mentees with capital to make their startups a reality. When you don't accept capital from someone else, you aren't beholden to anyone else's input. An inflated sense of financial well-being can result in sloppy budgeting and accounting as you write checks here and there without pause.

Startup 92

Startup Capital Blogging Ideas 92

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 16, 2011

After college Joanne worked for 4 years in retail apparel at Macy’s where she initially managed sales reps on the floor and then worked as a buyer of clothing. This is where she first developed sales skills. She doubled her salary by going into sales. to $12m in sales. “A lot of sales is innate.

Startup 311

Startup Sales Venture Capital Entrepreneur 311

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop blogging and they took over my blog as an asset in the sale of the company. I had seen many cycles and decided that since I was going to do it all over again I should write about it. I decided to write about my experience and to be blunt. And covered we did.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Blogging Startup Slides 274

socalTECH

AUGUST 27, 2014

We caught up with CEO and co-founder Brett Rossman to learn more about the company and how it''s been able to grow, profitably, all without raising a dime of outside capital. We generate thousands of new customers everyday for clients such as Ally Bank, GE Capital, Transunion, and a few other big brands.

Startup 239

Startup El Segundo Marketing Media 239

From the Venture Trenches

MARCH 27, 2013

The recent firing of Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason is a cautionary tale of the increased scrutiny and heightened expectations that come from accessing increasingly larger amounts of investment capital. Is outside capital really required? Who should you approach, “friends and family”, passive investors or value added institutions?

Venture Capital 45

Venture Capital Capital Anthem Startup 45

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 29, 2014

Will every customer who feels bombarded with sales requests want to take your call? Well, for starters you need to be a great networker. You need to know how to write good & action oriented emails. Do you think the SVP of Marketing from Coca Cola is going to respond to your every email? It’s your job to persist.

Venture Capital 389

Venture Capital Email Startup Conference 389

socalTECH

FEBRUARY 17, 2017

I had a sales force when I was at SkyPipeline, selling telecom, networking, and broadband wireless products. Sending the zeros and ones into the air was the same and sending nutrients into your mitochondria, except that at Visalus, it was not capital intensive like it was at SkyPipeline. That's my basic method to mayhem.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Entrepreneur Technical Review Software Review 100

Tech Zulu Event

NOVEMBER 30, 2012

million, brings the company’s aggregate amount of capital raised to $2.5 25 Years of Writing Code. 25 Years of Writing Code. At BigVisible, he coached teams at Capital Group as part of a large 1,400 person company-wide agile transformation. CapLinked is changing this with our intuitive and easy-to-use platform.”.

Technical Review 88

Technical Review Software Review Bertelsmann Technology 88

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 10, 2014

If you’re an early investor like I am that often means writing the first $2-3 million check into a business that previously had either survived on fumes or on a $500,000 angel round. In a VC business when you raise additional capital you need to “level up” and act the round you are. Objection Handling training.

Startup 381

Startup Resource Venture Capital Activity 381

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 27, 2011

I worked with an entrepreneur who was to appear at a startup networking event where he was to talk about his company’s plans. Marketing futures can be really good for enterprise software companies where the information is passed between sales rep and potential customer in terms of near-term roadmap. You don’t.

Marketing 380

Marketing Startup Press Technical Advisors 380

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 14, 2012

…” I’ll write soon on my views of why I believe Instagram took off as a social network and what I think comes next. Instagram happens to be one of the few social networks I regularly use along with Twitter. My friend Christin Herron of Intel Capital weighed in on the issue.

Venture Capital 316

Venture Capital Pricing Social Network Acquisition 316

InfoChachkie

JANUARY 16, 2018

Without taking a dime of outside capital, the company has achieved impressive success in a competitive, SaaS market segment, landing companies such as Nike, Intuit, NASA, AutoDesk and PBS. The problem is that stakeholders, like marketing and sales, don’t know what the latest version of the roadmap is.

Venture Capital 115

Venture Capital Entrepreneur Santa Barbara SaaS 115

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 24, 2019

Now customers judge you by your visibility to them at public forums, your writing, videos, and what other public figures say. Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is recognized as an influencer in online retail, doubling sales annually, by giving away shoes to the needy. Highlight your credibility by visibility and relationships.

Custom 93

Custom Customer IBM IBM 93

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 23, 2015

” It was meant both as a call to those writing angel checks into other people’s companies that they ought to think about putting that capital toward themselves either by becoming a startup founder or (and this was my real point) by taking an under-market salary in a company where they can learn the right skills to do it in the future.

Technical Review 150

Technical Review Startup Venture Capital IP 150

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This is part of my series on Raising Venture Capital. Many businesses that pitch to me have White Elephant issues and I’d like to tell you how to deal with these when you’re raising venture capital. million for a social networking site 18 months ago. I was looking for a person to head up my UK sales team.

Venture Capital 264

Venture Capital Startup Training Sales 264

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 22, 2010

File this under both Startup Adivce and Sales & Marketing Advice. Journalists don’t know enough about your company before the show, don’t have time for proper research, and you will be competing for their time afterward with 49+ other companies that want them to write about you. - Many other great companies are not. -

Tips 307

Tips Startup Press Blogging 307

Tech.Co

FEBRUARY 14, 2017

Each day Doppels will let you know whose birthday it is within your social network or local area and offer you a wish, gift or text option. Writing a wish list for birthday presents at 10 years-old is expected. Doppels also gives others the opportunity to send you a note or gift tailored to your interests. How great is that?!

Startup 126

Startup Venice Social Network Tool 126

InfoChachkie

JULY 14, 2011

Value Prop Twitter Style : “Ringrevenue’s call performance marketing platform enables ad networks, agencies, advertisers & publishers to generate more inbound sales calls.”. For businesses like this, finding new ways to drive more of these high-value inbound sales calls is key. You’re right.

Marketing 209

Marketing Advertising Paid Search Startup 209

socalTECH

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Neal Roche: I spent twenty years in the Internet networking business, working on internal hardware for test and measurement. I left there in 2010, and starting looking at the electric vehicle market, what Southern California Edison was planning, saw these charging networks, and how all of this was planned to be an intelligence network.

Help 178

Help Startup San Fernando Southern California 178

socalTECH

DECEMBER 11, 2018

Wildlink is backed by Mucker Capital. If I write back, and tell them to stay at the Marriott in Del Mar, we would detect the Marriott Del Mar in your message, whether that's on Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, in a text message, in an email, or whatever, and convert that into a link to one of our merchants who are part of the Wildfire network.

San Diego 159

San Diego Social Media Commerce Snapchat 159

InfoChachkie

JUNE 9, 2015

To better understand how the accelerator world has matured beyond Demo Da, I sought out Jason Denenberg, former partner at Angel Capital Group, and current Director of Entrepreneurship at Launch Tennessee (LaunchTN). If the sales aren’t there, it might be time for the entrepreneurs to either pivot or seek out a new venture.”

Startup 100

Startup Class LAMP Santa Barbara 100

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 14, 2014

All the data actually suggests with the growth of mobile, inbound sales calls will double from 30 billion to 60 billion in 3 years (source: Kelsey). Only naive people believe that but for inexperienced entrepreneurs you can be fooled into the narrative by the press who sometimes write stories without the actual data. PHONE CALLS.

Email 339

Email SaaS Venture Capital Google 339

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 2, 2010

This is part of my series on Understanding Venture Capital. I’m writing this series because if you better understand how VC firms work you can better target which firms make sense for you to speak with. If a fund has a $25 million fund then you know they aren’t going to be writing $5 million checks!

Venture Capital 269

Venture Capital Funding Invest GRP Partners 269

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2010

To the contrary – if you know how to sell your own work, can negotiate good rates, network well, keep consistent work and have a great reputation – it can be very rewarding. No rule is ever absolute no matter how it sounds when one writes a blog. So how did I come to work in the world of venture capital?

Startup 285

Startup Venture Capital Sales Software Review 285

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 23, 2013

It will affect your ability to get the right jobs and promotions as well as your ability to attract talent and capital. This started as a post in which I was going to write out tips to personal branding and became in stead an essay of my own branding journey. People form perceptions of you whether you like it or not.

Technical Advisors 385

Technical Advisors Marketing Startup Venture Capital 385

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 1, 2010

He invested $8 million in a company in the computer networking space. I’d like to get involved with capital efficient companies early in their lifecycle. I believe in my bones that entrepreneurs shouldn’t “over raise” capital. They should right size their capital raises. He was telling me about a deal he had done.

Entrepreneur 321

Entrepreneur GRP Partners Venture Capital Invest 321

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 14, 2009

The key to getting money is that the people writing the check trust you. If you’re really an entrepreneur you’ll find a way to network with the right people. When I write an angel round check I always tell me wife, “let’s assume that money is lost.&# So goes angel investing.

Angel 291

Angel Funding Venture Capital Startup 291

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

He writes with a great perspective and is well worth reading. I came across this blog post about getting a computer science degree as the best degree for getting into venture capital or working at a VC-backed start up. on all the computers and established a network using Novell. Sales is the lifeblood of every organization.

Startup 337

Startup Venture Capital Study Course 337