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Announcing a Deal I’ve Wanted to Talk About for a Year

Both Sides of the Table

I acted as the occasional mentor, advisor and coach to Ethan. Ethan recruited a great team of people to help build this proposition including Lisa Robinson running marketing and Rahul Thathoo as CTO who have been working tirelessly for the past year. I think it’s a beautifully designed site and product.

CTO Coach 359
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Document Your MVP for a Developer

SoCal CTO

I asked some of the same questions I ask in my Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions and then I get to a very common conversation: Me : Do you have specs? This should be an iterative process with advisors and customers providing feedback on the product. Conversations with a technical advisors or possible developers should be iterative.

Develop 354
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Time Rich, Time Poor and Apple

SoCal CTO

skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, March 20, 2007 Time Rich, Time Poor and Apple Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed Venture Partners has an interesting post: Time Rich or Time Poor? I would agree that Apples product design would suggest that it aims at Time Poor buyers. He has twenty years’ experience as a CTO.

CTO Coach 150
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The Audacious Plan to Make Electricity as Easy as WiFi

Both Sides of the Table

Meredith came to see me along with the CTO Marc Berte. If electricity could be transferred like WiFi but as safe as a soundwave we use on pregnant women’s bellies and at a price-point that was attractive this is a multi-billion market. The more we dug the more confident we became (and so did every advisor we used).

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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. The way we dealt with this issue is that we took each senior exec in the company (including the CFO and the CTO) and assigned them to important accounts. ” Of course I agree with this. ” PR.

Startup 150
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Investors, MVPs and Evidence of Traction

SoCal CTO

They may wonder if it can be built technically, but I (or other CTOs) can answer that question without building any code. Cases Where a Mockup is Not Enough There are a few cases where mockups or clickable prototypes may not be enough: Usability, interaction design, etc. It won because of interface, ease of use.

Metrics 264
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Top 40 Startup Posts for August 2010

SoCal CTO

August was a slow month in terms of traffic and I was away for a lot of the month, but there were some really great posts at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. Often board members give entrepreneurs two bits of advice regarding scale: Get a mentor. m the f%*kin’ boss.”. How it happens.

Startup 191