SoCal CTO

JANUARY 18, 2011

I received an inquiry from a reader of my blog and thought I would provide some thoughts, but would definitely welcome input: I am an unpaid CTO of a small startup. Of course, that doesn’t help here. Find a lawyer and someone who does CTO searches for VC backed companies in your area. What are the specifics of the 2%?

CTO 150

CTO CTO Hire CTO Coach Equity 150

TechCrunch LA

MARCH 8, 2019

Responding to Elizabeth Warren’s call to regulate and break up some of the nation’s largest technology companies, the venture capitalists that invest in technology companies are advising the presidential hopeful to move slowly and not break anything. — Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) March 8, 2019. ” .

Technical Review 144

Technical Review Startup Chief Technology Officer Social Media 144

SoCal CTO

MARCH 12, 2012

I've recently received several emails from people looking for a technical cofounder for their startup. I promised I would write this post with some thoughts and ideas on the topic. " Typically, this requires quite a bit more information for me to be able to respond and provide real help.

CTO Hire 211

CTO Hire CTO Coach Startup Equity 211

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

We all like to think of startups as “non hierarchic&# organizations and to some extent that should be true. I see two common mistakes in companies (not just in startups, in fact). You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on.

Startup 308

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 24, 2021

The Valley has obsessed with a quick up-and-to-right momentum story because we were thought to live in “winner take most” markets. But markets have changed and I think investors, founders and experienced executives who want to join later-stage startups can all benefit from playing the long game. It literally drove FOMO.

Venture Capital 363

Venture Capital Capital Funding Startup 363

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2019

I had just left Salesforce.com where I was VP, Products, after they had acquired my second startup. VC is a long-term business Some businesses are overnight successes but few of them really move immediately up and to the right. We not only have our Series A funds that can write $500k?—?$15

Venture Capital 223

Venture Capital IP Startup Google 223

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

Startups are hard. You join teams that got good write-ups on TechCrunch, have great VCs, have star CEO’s, whatever. We tell startup stories. Our founder, Yves Sisteron, was my mentor and board member at my first startup. Stuart Lander has joined Upfront Ventures to help us run operations.

CTO Hire 320

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 9, 2018

You race back to the office to tell everybody how well it went and you wait for the follow-up call to have a partners’ meeting or talk about term sheets or at least dip into due diligence. The meeting was only supposed to last 45 minutes but you ran 90. The assistant tried to end the meeting twice but was shoooshed away.

Software Review 381

Software Review Startup Email Conference 381

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

There is a battle between entrepreneurs who try to change the world and solve a meaningful problem and those who write take-down pieces with no apparent personal benefit other than attention. Even bigger is the desire to stick one’s middle finger up at all of the people who doubted you all along. ” **. Time will tell.

Technical Review 417

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SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 14, 2009

Cliff Allen is someone I've known for quite a few years and he's a go to person for me when I'm thinking about issues around marketing, sales, technology, startups and networking. I moved into writing software to analyze audience data, and wrote a lot of computer graphics software. What keeps you up at night? Great stuff.

Los Angeles 150

Los Angeles Networking Marketing Startup 150

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 23, 2012

One of the first tough decisions that startup founders have to make is how to allocate or split the equity among co-founders. The easy answer of splitting it equally among all co-founders, since there is minimal value at that point, is usually the worst possible answer, and often results in a later startup failure due to an obvious inequity.

Startup 101

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Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 12, 2018

Many people will write the history on why Ring became an enormously successful company and why it became a real-world unicorn in a world when many startups are anointed that merely on paper. It is an LA-based company that was recently acquired by Amazon, which you can read more about in this incredibly well-researched article.

Startup 247

Startup Pricing Product Marketing 247

socalTECH

JULY 22, 2016

Rufus Labs is one of a number of hardware startups which have started to proliferate in the community, due to low cost hardware, 3D printing, and crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Where they start to fail, is one, they are handheld. Because of that, wearables have a good leg up.

Technical Review 100

Technical Review Startup Software Review CTO Hire 100

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 5, 2011

I’m inspired by the enthusiasm of the young, emerging startup ecosystem that is here. As I gear up to give a keynote at the annual Seattle 2.0 awards dinner on Thursday night I started reflected on what it would take to “change the trajectory&# for Seattle or for any regional market, really.

Venture Capital 317

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 13, 2018

The mistake entrepreneurs make is either writing a lengthy email (everybody has too much email so it will get skimmed / not digested) or not having a deck which means the VC can’t quickly determine his or her fit as a potential investor. The key is WHAT you send. I recommend sub 10MB. You’ll get more value out of the meeting that way?

Venture Capital 261

Venture Capital Slides Email Startup 261

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

On December 2nd, 2006 I wrote the blog post published later in this post when I was CEO of startup Koral about my experiences in pitching VCs. I had seen many cycles and decided that since I was going to do it all over again I should write about it. Another called Parker Harris, the co-founder and CTO. My blog was wiped out.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Blogging Startup Slides 274

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 2, 2011

A lot of my time is spent helping early-stage companies get to proof points so that they can raise capital. Because of this, I've always tried to stay up-to-speed on how early-stage investors look at valuation of companies. He just post: Establishing the Pre-money Valuation of Pre-revenue Startups. It's required reading.

Startup 198

Startup Custom Development Sales Writing 198

SoCal CTO

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

I recently got together with Aaron Shechet and an early stage startup to discuss the direction the company might want to take. I grew up in Los Angeles and went to undergrad at UC Santa Barbara, graduating in 2003 with Honors in Economics. While at UC Santa Barbara, I started a café which served over 1100 dorm residents.

Startup 150

Startup SEO Pepperdine Blogging 150

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

One of the first tough decisions that startup founders have to make is how to allocate or split the equity among co-founders. The easy answer of splitting it equally among all co-founders, since there is minimal value at that point, is usually the worst possible answer, and often results in a later startup failure due to an obvious inequity.

Equity 91

Equity Startup CTO Hire CTO Coach 91

SoCal CTO

MARCH 18, 2010

I started out as screenwriter, went into local television, ran ad sales in the west for AOL and joined Facebook in the companies very early days. Today I lead a small consultancy that helps advertising supported develop and scale the revenue producing sides of their businesses. With that as a start it rarely feels burdensome.

Startup 225

Startup Los Angeles Social Network Twiistup 225

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 5, 2010

I started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute of an entrepreneur : Tenacity. They often make great team members such as head of products, CTO, head of sales, CFO, etc. A caller dialed in to ask us questions about his startup. I’ll help you raise the fund. I finally called bullshit.

Entrepreneur 293

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

Understanding where your VC partner sits in their respective fund and where their fund is in the cycle of its investment lifecycle will help you understand your VCs behavior. In addition to helping manage the board Chris also helps represent the interests of the angel investors / common stock holders. How much is too much?

Tips 365

Tips Email Venture Capital CTO Coach 365

socalTECH

FEBRUARY 11, 2014

However, in a very unusual move, the City of Los Angeles has tapped a true technology veteran and insider, well known to those here in the industry-- Peter Marx , most recently at Qualcomm--to head up the city''s efforts to both adopt technology and improve the city''s relationship with its growing technology companies.

Los Angeles 203

Los Angeles Technology Startup Examples 203

socalTECH

FEBRUARY 17, 2017

He eventually founded and sold consumer health firm ViSalus to a public company and is now back making investments, in technology companies, as a venture capitalist here at Los Angeles-based HashtagOne (www.hashtagone.com). Tell us a bit of the story on how you started HashtagOne? It's all about leverage.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Entrepreneur Technical Review Software Review 100

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 12, 2010

I scan it for the most important messages to be sure nothing urgent has popped up. Colin Kelley, the CTO of RingRevenue , left a comment in my last post about the need to “ mask interrupts &# in order to get work done. They taught us to write down questions when they came up and batch them together in point sheets.

Product 280

Product Startup Email Technical Review 280

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 30, 2014

As I’ve written about recently, at Upfront Ventures we started talking a couple of years ago about wanting to fund stuff with more meaning. Meredith came to see me along with the CTO Marc Berte. But the most important character building itself was just seeing the talent of the people who were lining up to work with Meredith.

Technical Review 418

Technical Review Software Review CTO Hire IP 418

SoCal CTO

MARCH 22, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Thursday, March 22, 2007 Discussion Creation Among Bloggers - LinkedIn, Blogging and Discussion Groups Ive been participating in a Yahoo Group that are users of LinkedIn and who are Bloggers: [link] Its an interesting group of folks from diverse backgrounds. Maybe this meme will help.

Blogging 150

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socalTECH

FEBRUARY 21, 2012

Steve Jillings has a long track record of running successful startups in Southern California, ranging from such companies as FrontBridge Technologies (sold to Microsoft in 2005 for over $200M) and Vantage Media (acquired in 2007). To learn more, we caught up with Steve. Every other hand goes down, and ours stays up.

Marina Del Rey 238

Marina Del Rey Startup IP Examples 238

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

I grew up believing that human behavior was 20% nature, 80% nurture. Some data like those in the studies I mentioned above might help influence our thinking but the answer is, in the end, subjective. I wasn’t going to write about it since he had just covered the topic and echoed my point of view. Nature vs. Nurture.

Startup 289

Startup Statistics Entrepreneur Study 289

socalTECH

APRIL 29, 2014

We caught up with one of the local teams competing in that competition, VOXearch (www.voxearch.com), to learn more about the prize as well as their specific approach to the competition. Mike Outmesguine: We''re one of about thirty teams left in the challenge, out of more than 300 that signed up last August.

Startup 262

Startup Competition Software Review UCLA 262

socalTECH

MARCH 12, 2013

What is it about the content delivery network market which has enabled Santa Monica-based EdgeCast to go from startup to over $100M in revenues in only a few, short years? We caught up with James Segil , the firm's President, to hear the story behind that big growth at the company. We've grown really fast.

CTO Hire 248

CTO Hire Content Networking Web 248

Tech Zulu Event

NOVEMBER 6, 2013

Forget visits to random restaurants, myfab5 uses the power of the crowd to help you search for the best restaurant in town. Founded by Omeid Seirafi-Pour , Calvin Schemanski and John Gulbronson they aim to help users find fabulous restaurants in their cities. What is myfab5? myfab5 is a platform that reinvents the restaurant review.

Software Review 79

Software Review Technical Review Writing Startup 79

socalTECH

JULY 23, 2012

As a hiring manager, and as the former CTO of Buy.com, Navid Nobakht , Co-Founder of Recmnd.Me ([link] had a problem--how to really figure out if someone he was hiring could actually execute. All the costs, from hosting to storage to scaling up an scaling down are all gone. Describe what Recmnd.me is all about?

CTO Hire 147

CTO Hire Startup Sites Technical Review 147

Tech Zulu Event

APRIL 23, 2013

Founded in the summer of 2011 and their first product out a few weeks ago amSTATS wants to help users to follow fitness events and programs near them and find a great fitness trainer to help them stay fit. TechZulu caught up with Michael Piermont, amSTATZ Chief Executive Officer and this is what he revealed.

Social Network 92

Social Network Networking Training Summary 92

socalTECH

JUNE 18, 2009

Our interview today is with Santa Monica-based OneCubicle (www.onecubicle.com), a new startup we ran across recently, which is looking to provide a more professional social networking site for younger people. Why did you decide to start yet another social networking site? It's not in my make up.

Social Network 100

Social Network Entertainment Startup CTO Coach 100

Tech Zulu Event

JUNE 28, 2012

The first-ever Silicon Beach Fest attracted more than 2,000 attendees from LA, San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Barbara, New York, Toronto, and London to celebrate LA startups and entertainment with panels, parties, pitch fests, hackathon, and beach games: volleyball, basketball and surfing lessons in Santa Monica and Venice on June 21-23, 2012.

Hollywood 67

Hollywood Technical Review Startup Rustic Canyon 67

InfoChachkie

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

Messenger : Thorsten von Eicken , RightScale’s Co-Founder and CTO, Chief Architect at Citrix Online (formerly Expertcity) and Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and UC Santa Barbara. That’s what we’ve started to tackle and the mission RightScale is on. 9) The story of how you started RightScale is classic.

Cloud Computing 188

Cloud Computing Santa Barbara EC2 Startup 188