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What Startup Advisors Do I Need?

SoCal CTO

You can’t afford and don’t want to hire a full-time CTO or architect. But, advisors, coaches, and mentors can often fill the bill. For me, if I can help you within a couple hours Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions , I’m happy to do that and I don’t expect compensation or equity for that.

CTO Coach 241
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People Management: Startup Teams Should Dip but not Skip

Both Sides of the Table

You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on. An obvious example would be in sales. You’re also learning directly about the skills of your sales staff by observing them in action.

Startup 308
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Be Careful About Being a Meddling Startup CEO

Both Sides of the Table

In practice it can be a fine line between sparring partner / coach and stepping over the line to brute-force persuasion. At times I wanted the engineering team to produce features to support our sales efforts to I occasionally leaned on them a bit. Another area we CEOs often meddle is in sales. I did this.

Startup 150
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What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI

Both Sides of the Table

Most of them are completely mundane such as choosing which: bank, office space, 1-year lease vs. 2-year lease, logo, URL, pricing structure or which VC. The technology team disagrees on direction and wants resolutions. Your head of sales thinks she should fire somebody. Should she take a chance and potentially ruffle feathers?

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Venture Capital is About Human Capital

Both Sides of the Table

We help founders through difficult moments, we help coach, we act as sparring partners, we help them resolve conflicts when they’re fighting with co-founders and we help them deal with adversity as well as successes. That’s why I often say The role of VC is “chief psychologist.”

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Value and Meetups - SEO / SEM

SoCal CTO

Then the organizer went into a 20 minute sales pitch around his new training/coaching offering. The meeting had a decent case study and some pretty good discussion around the room of different tools that you might consider using. It felt like a bad time share presentation.

SEM 150
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8 Tips To Get the Most Out of Your Investors and Board

Both Sides of the Table

In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. When we recommended that Rob get a CEO coach he not only embraced it but craved it and thanked us for suggesting it. Rob is driven to learn. And improve.

Tips 365