Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

In my experience, the key steps I look for always include the following: Testing the idea against customers who have money to spend. Prepare your marketing story for customers and investors. Start by developing an “elevator pitch,” that you can deliver in thirty seconds to hook a potential customer or investor.

Ideas 94

Ideas Slides Technical Review Patents 94

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2010

The path I went down after a few years was to hire more process driven people and devolved more daily operational ownership to people running individual functions such as product management, sales management, finance, etc. Over time I realized I was a bit of a bottleneck in pricing and I didn’t add significant value.

Sales 296

Sales Pricing Startup Customer 296

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 21, 2019

For years software development worked on a “waterfall model” in which you did research, design, build, test, deploy and then watch how users reacted to your product. Often these projects took 12–18 months so by the time companies shipped product they often found out that the product didn’t meet customer needs.

Startup 234

Startup Slides Venture Capital Course 234

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 15, 2017

Management teams whisk through slides trying to get through a presentation to share how great things are going and they are eager to get through the meeting so they can get back to their real jobs. I can’t change who your board members are so let me offer some thoughts on how to make your interactions with your board more productive.

Tips 212

Tips Slides Startup Technical Review 212

socalTECH

APRIL 26, 2017

One, is an upright, traditional looking microscopes, where you look at glass slides. The first thing you are trained on, is to qualify customers and figure out if they need upright or inverted microscopes. We've created an alternative, a hybrid microscope for the price of one. There are typically two types of microscopes.

Tech Coast Angels 124

Tech Coast Angels Startup Sales Slides 124

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 13, 2016

As a startup advisor and investor, I recommend a pitch deck with about 10 slides backed up with a written business plan of approximately 20 pages, both containing quantified answers to the following key questions. Investors want to hear about customers with money who have a painful problem that you can solve now.

Invest 108

Invest Startup Slides Equity 108

socalTECH

APRIL 26, 2017

One, is an upright, traditional looking microscopes, where you look at glass slides. The first thing you are trained on, is to qualify customers and figure out if they need upright or inverted microscopes. We've created an alternative, a hybrid microscope for the price of one. There are typically two types of microscopes.

Tech Coast Angels 100

Tech Coast Angels Startup Sales Slides 100

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

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. He went out and found a developer and built a product. We missed our sales target by more than 66% for the year but we had great slides explaining why. What lovely charts!

Entrepreneur 414

Entrepreneur Technical Review Slides CTO Coach 414

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 14, 2014

In their passion and excitement about a new product or service, entrepreneurs tend to continually narrow the scope of potential competitors, and often claim to have no direct competitors. All of these are competitors in terms of speed, price, or luxury. Order-of-magnitude cost reduction or productivity increase.

Competition 93

Competition Startup Patents Slides 93

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 11, 2013

They envision a stable environment after that point, and may have convinced themselves that they will be safer and happier with a livable income, maintaining a loyal but flat customer base. Once they see you have developed credible traction, they can grab your space with less cost (meaning lower price) than you had to put into developing it.

Entrepreneur 105

Entrepreneur Slides IP Technology 105

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 23, 2014

They envision a stable environment after that point, and may have convinced themselves that they will be safer and happier with a livable income, maintaining a loyal but flat customer base. Once they see you have developed credible traction, they can grab your space with less cost (meaning lower price) than you had to put into developing it.

Startup 100

Startup Slides Entrepreneur IP 100

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 2, 2015

Since the financial downturn of 2008, I have seen a new business model emerging which embodies a greater focus on social and environmental responsibility, and a new requirement for trust and sharing, as well as customer and community collaboration. The days of mass production and commodity pricing as an asset are gone.

Customer 55

Customer Custom Slides Commerce 55

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 14, 2015

I put up this slide as part of my discussion. Twitter is a great product and a great company. One of the points I tried to make is that as venture capital investors as an industry we seem to have a healthy disdain for public market investors. It may not be RIP Good Times. But I’m certainly willing to say RIP Excess Burn.

Venture Capital 150

Venture Capital Slides Capital Funding 150

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 22, 2011

They envision a stable environment after that point, and may have convinced themselves that they will be safer and happier with a livable income, maintaining a loyal but flat customer base. Once they see you have developed credible traction, they can grab your space with less cost (meaning lower price) than you had to put into developing it.

Entrepreneur 95

Entrepreneur Slides IP Technology 95

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 21, 2010

As startup entrepreneurs we all want to work with them because having their name as reference clients makes it so much easier for marketing, PR, selling to other customers, fund raising and even recruiting. BigCo calls you to review your product and decides they want to use you. Have minimums but a sliding scale.

Startup 298

Startup Sales Slides Metrics 298

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

I love the enthusiasm, the boundless energy and the sense of possibility that comes from having an idea that hasn’t yet been beat up in the marketplace of competing ideas, customer contracts, VC skepticism, jaded journalists or fickle consumers who are on the The New, New Thing. They can help you with pricing.

Outsource Development 150

Outsource Development Metrics Startup Sales 150

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 19, 2010

He envisions a stable environment after that point, and may have convinced himself that he will be safer and happier with a livable income, maintaining a loyal but flat customer base. Once they see you have developed credible traction, they can grab your space with less cost (meaning lower price) than you had to put into developing it.

Startup 57

Startup Slides Entrepreneur IP 57

Tech Zulu Event

MAY 9, 2014

This was a chance to blow open the story on their companies, to address a room full of potential investors, mentors, partners, customers, and press. They showed very impressive average customer repurchases. Harnessing more energy from our grid by emphasizing efficiency, not increased factory and power production.

Startup 111

Startup Mobile Commerce Education 111

Tech Zulu Event

MARCH 16, 2015

And when it comes to timing, wait until you’ve come up with a working prototype and developed your product before you seek external funding. This can be a great way to test your product and get customer feedback. If your product is capital-intensive this can be a good financing option. Be careful how you price this.

Startup 40

Startup Venture Capital Equity Funding 40

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

If you buy into the argument that a strong board can actually help you then this post will lay out how to help you have more productive meetings by preparing properly in advance. The deck itself was produced by a committee of functional team lead who were asked to do 5–7 slides each for an update. There are too many pages.

Startup 226

Startup Slides Metrics News 226

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 23, 2013

I have long advised startup companies that if you don’t control your messaging somebody else will and your potential customers will form impressions of you shaped by somebody else or by nobody at all. Send me in a corner to work on slides, graphs, spreadsheets and charts. I have published many of these PR Tips before.

Technical Advisors 385

Technical Advisors Marketing Startup Venture Capital 385

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product. think his slides are great (and by far much easier on the eye then mine.). By doing the job.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Startup Product Technology 175

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 25, 2009

I’ve sat through a lot of VC pitches and having been CEO of an enterprise software firm for many years I’ve also sat through many customer meetings with sales teams. The VC might have tried a few times to prompt a discussion and you didn’t take the queue but in stead reverted back to slides.

Venture Capital 275

Venture Capital Sales Slides Startup 275

SoCal CTO

NOVEMBER 11, 2009

I was on the way back to LA from a ski vacation in Switzerland where I decided while sliding down a glacier that if I survived I would start my own advertising agency. We came up with a positioning strategy that helps them sell value-added when recession-pinched customers are squeezing them for low rates.

Marketing 150

Marketing Social Media Blogging Media 150

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 6, 2010

Imagine the “typical&# deal – somebody comes into a VC’s office, they’ve never met, they’re highly referred by a friend and they’re pitching a product demo and a PPT. And VC’s are tough customers. If I see your alpha product then I can judge how it develops over time.

Startup 360

Startup Venture Capital Invest Slides 360

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

If you were a newly minted, venture-backed consumer Internet company you had to have a deal with AOL to reach your customers. Fox bought MySpace for $580 million and then did a deal with Google worth more than the purchase price to serve up ads. They controlled distribution to the masses. Google acquired YouTube for $1.65

Social Network 318

Social Network Networking Web 2.0 Startup 318

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

Some really great stuff in 2010 that aims to help startups around product, technology, business models, etc.

Startup 378

Startup Venture Capital Blogging CTO Coach 378