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He had an idea for a startup that would help consumers better book service jobs and would take on Service Magic, which he believed had a business model that could be disrupted. I acted as the occasional mentor, advisor and coach to Ethan. When Ethan was considering leaving Google we talked about it. He was seeking $500k.
Background This post partly really came about as a result of a great conversation yesterday with David Croslin a former CTO at HP who recently conducted an interesting experiment. I am looking for one or two startups that I can work with on their road to success as a virtual C-level officer, board member, advisor or other relationship.
You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. Yes, I know it’s my job as the CEO to be the coach for people and that’s fine. So we discussed his ideas several times. He wanted to be the guy who did it.
It was a great conversation and I thought it would be a good idea to do some visible networking with Aaron to get to know him better. We are not “finders” and usually serve the role of advisor and attorney. Sometimes we draft business plans and coach the entrepreneurs on their pitch, and sometimes we even help develop a business model.
Then the organizer went into a 20 minute sales pitch around his new training/coaching offering. What's interesting about that opinion is that there were people in the room who were more than happy to share their ideas around tools and techniques to use as part of the discussion. It felt like a bad time share presentation.
Entrepreneurs are supposed to have insights that others don’t have and we’re supposed to be good judges about which entrepreneurs and executives have both the most clever ideas and the right skill sets to do transformational things against all odds. I don’t think this is the job. So I tell people we’re fundamentally in the people business.
If both the CEO and the CTO are needed to attend an important meeting out of town, who will fulfill their roles of running the company smoothly? In the startup world, being able to stick to a plan and take actions according to those plans will bring your ideas and visions into reality. Ideas are a dime a dozen.
I started as a teenager, and I did babysitting, life guarding, and swim coaching. We've had a lot of advisors along the way, in the financial and technology realm, which has helped us with everything. The biggest transition for us, was taking on a co-founder, our CTO, who has the really intensive tech background.
Those include how-to on resumes, aptitude tests, videos, coaching seminars, and more of that nature. If you have a good idea, a good marketplace with certain characteristics, every company needs technology, every company needs finance, sales, marketing, and operations--that's the hard part.
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