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At TechEmpower, we frequently talk to startup founders, CEOs, product leaders, and other innovators about their next big tech initiative. After all, that’s what tech innovation is all about. Who’s helping you with fundraising? How will you be taking this to market? But there are some common elements too.
Most innovators don’t have a technical background, so it’s hard to evaluate the truth of the situation. And unless they have a tech background, they can’t look under the hood themselves. The answer is to engage a trusted outside source for a TechnicalReview – a deep-dive assessment that provides a C-suite perspective.
But what was interesting to me was that I found myself recommending that each of them should have a technical adviser. Review the code being built. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm doing as a Part-Time CTO or Technical Advisor for startups. Strategic Technical Advisor. Why do this without the right technical advisor?
Why do this without the right technical advisor? Just like attorneys, technical advisors can help navigate waters that many find murky. Actually, many startups need two kinds of technical advisors. Would you create contracts without an attorney? And Maybe You Need Two!
I did a presentation this week at Coloft that looked at how Non-Technical Founders can go about getting their MVP built. And the back-end is something that a non-technical founder can manage. We end up using WordPress a lot as the marketing front-end of our web sites. Review the code being built.
That doesn’t mean that entrepreneurs should ignore business and market realities, under the assumption that success is a random phenomenon. Find a recognized billion dollar and growing market. Thus I’m suggesting that you do your duediligence carefully, and pick the right idea before you start.
Please help me congratulate him by Re/Tweeting this post (and following him if you don’t already). Industry reviews. Helping be the VC “presence” at key events. Associates often shadow partners at board meetings so that they can help follow up with the company on important initiatives between board meetings.
Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. They are the lifeblood of many companies yet they are different than the traditional technology startup DNA so the ways that you hire, motivate, compensate and assess performance of these individuals will be different. My first startup was no different.
Many of you have read or at least know the primary thesis of “ Crossing the Chasm &# the seminal book on marketing your products to mainstream consumers by Geoffrey Moore. It influenced a generation of techmarketers. We all intuitively know this curve now but we don’t all market effectively to it.
You need to do the duediligence to make that decision before you sign away your equity. As a former startup investor, I was often involved with duediligence on founders, and I felt that founders should do the same on co-founders, as well as investors. The same benefits also apply to a joint venture.
One of the largest concentrations of technical talent in Los Angeles is in Glendale, at YP -- staffed with a surprising number of Los Angeles startup vets. Our whole product and technology team is about 500 people. Darren Clark: Our missions is to help small businesses and communities grow. Louis and Atlanta.
I spent my days meeting companies, figuring out what areas of the market interested me and trying to get a sense for how VCs thought about fair valuations. I started showing my partners more deals that I found interesting and doing loads of analysis on the future of markets I thought were ripe for disruption. The market had tanked.
I think this is a combination of being realists as venture capitalists that outsized returns in our funds must come from taking on bigger, more impactful projects that can move markets. The practical uses for uBeam technology is limitless. Did anybody hold patents that would prevent us from using this technology? Was it safe?
I wrote this conundrum and the need to take charge of how the market define your skills in my much-read blog post on “ personal branding.” ” If you don’t create the message about yourself, the market will. He or she has worked at some very successful big technology or media companies and went to a great school.
One of the largest concentrations of technical talent in Los Angeles is in Glendale, at YP (www.yp.com) -- staffed with a surprising number of Los Angeles startup vets. Our whole product and technology team is about 500 people. Darren Clark: Our missions is to help small businesses and communities grow. Louis and Atlanta.
However, Redondo Beach-based StaffRanker (www.staffranker.com) has rolled out a system to help those companies better manage what is a notoriously difficult segment of the labor market, which has a lot of turnover and which just doesn''t match existing, corporate performance management systems. It turns out, it''s not so easy.
Today’s $24 billion storage market in the US has these same key disadvantages and that was the genesis of Sam Rosen’s initial idea for MakeSpace , which I initially funded 15 months ago. Or even to help you figure out what you have in storage without hauling your ass down to the facility and trolling through all of your old stuff.
We will have to build (or buy) technology in this area.” The thing is … what I see many sales execs do is burn up countless hours on mid-level campaigns that get torpedoed when the go up the organization due to lack of budget, a desire to own that core IP or other more pressing organization priorities.
Saving cost won’t help you if you can’t make the daily innovations required to stay competitive. Leading edge technology software and manufacturing require constant course corrections and iterative restarts. Internal services, like marketing and accounting, are more manageable and have less customer visibility.
If you’re a technology startup you need to excel at product, of course. But being best-in-class at online marketing is also a sine qua non to standout from your peer group. The starting point of product IS marketing, which is what a lot of young entrepreneurs that never studied business don’t realize.
There’s an article making the rounds in tech circles titled “ Growth Hacking is Bull ” written by Muhammad Saleem. I actually really enjoyed many of the points Muhammad made about marketing in general and I found myself nodding through the entirety of the article except for it’s core premise.
Companies that have leveraged technology to make the procurement and delivery of food more accessible to more people have been seeing a big surge of business this year, as millions of consumers are encouraged (or outright mandated, due to Covid-19) to socially distance or want to avoid the crowds of physical shopping and eating excursions.
Several people have recently come to me to help them source and/or hire full-time CTOs for their startup having found me through my post that looks at: Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data. I'd suggest: Startup CTO or Developer , Startup Founder Developer Gap , Part-Time CTO , Technology Advisor , CTO Founder , Acting CTO. Not enough?
They will often run all of the daily reports into them covering off for finance, sales, marketing, biz dev & HR. Many times they also pick up product and tech, too. Often times you find the CEO who really just likes to do product or tech. Similarly I talk to CEOs who can’t do a sales pipeline review with me.
The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do. Testing is what helps determine whether you’re really on to something.
Michael Chasin: LawKick.com is essentially a marketplace that makes it easier than ever to find legal help. How the website works, is the client goes to the website, and indicates what they need help with. It took a while to do market research, but we ended up starting an app for law. What''s LawKick about?
It’s a great one about entrepreneurship, friendship and the collaborative economy that is helping families in need across the world. Companies like DogVacay solve a real need in the market. They can read reviews, see pictures and even talk to the family before confirming. That’s a fact. The Background. I registered.
The press around the raise & company was fantastic and the promise of their technology – wireless charging that works as easily as WiFi – would positively affect many of our lives. uBeam’s tech does work and I have safely seen it demo’d in the real life many times. Working on it. And being ambitious.
Taking on a business partner can be an excellent strategic decision in helping move the business forward. Access to new markets. Access to new technologies. Perform preliminary duediligence: Review the business plan including marketing, sales strategies and financial needs. Is it by committee?
You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on. Similarly I liked to keep myself apprised of the technical decisions we were making. But as a CEO you can’t rely solely on this information.
Many of the founders of these companies are surprised to learn that I'm willing to review what they are doing (maybe an hour) and get on the phone for an hour with them and provide free advice. Generally I can provide quite a bit of help in that brief time. And I try my best to point them to resources that can help them longer term.
Many of the founders of these companies are surprised to learn that I'm willing to review what they are doing (maybe an hour) and get on the phone for an hour with them and provide free advice. Generally I can provide quite a bit of help in that brief time. And I try my best to point them to resources that can help them longer term.
The main thrust of the post is that with YouTube taking a 45% of revenue and talent taking 70% of the remaining revenue, YouTube Networks didn’t have sustainable businesses unless they invested heavily in technology as a tool to increase margin and provide defensibility. That is the definition of Disruptive Technology.
Seattle should be the envy of any non Silicon Valley tech community in the country. 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. The ingredients are all here. As I gear up to give a keynote at the annual Seattle 2.0
If they’re successful in the long run they will also help reduce water consumption and will help create healthier lifestyles. Their vision is to create technology and products for a world where food is grown in and around where people live. He & Yves penned this post about feeding the world’s 9 billion people.
When I was running startups I felt like a horse with blinders on because I was super focused on the content management market and ignored many other markets. They outline the problems that exist in markets, their approach to the solutions, they update me on competitors and they show me their economic models. Maybe 10-15%.
It surprises me that anybody would buy a car without this data because as most people know MSRP on cars is mostly an irrelevant data point used for marketing purposes. “Invoice price” is an equally meaningless marketing tool. It got me thinking about the tech industry. But I digress. They want to be ballers.
I pointed out that the storage market in the US alone is ~$30 billion / year and there is no dominant provider — the largest player has < 10% market share. So how did a company that provides storage grow so fast (we’ll exit 2017 with 10’s of millions in recurring revenue), why is it so defensible and is it really a tech startup?
Chris Dixon is one of my favorite people in tech and writes one of the few blogs I read religiously. If you don’t read it and you care about tech & entrepreneurship, you should. He’s thoughtful about markets, investors, products and is always very well reasoned in his arguments.
There are obvious reasons the industry has had less-than-desirable returns, including: massive over-funding of the sector, huge increases in inexperienced venture capitalists that took a decade to peter out, and the massive correction in the value of the public stock markets that closed many exit opportunities for half a decade.
Eventually you need a VP of Product to handle your product roadmap, a CTO for engineering leadership and VPs of sales, marketing & biz dev. The “span of control” for a growing tech startup is probably 6-9 people. You help them prioritize their objectives and review the results. A larger marketing team?
If this isn’t you, we’d probably still have a look if you did something truly exception – probably at startup or tech firm. The chosen candidate will probably have worked for a very reputable firm that is either in technology, consulting, investment banking, media or a startup. We need help. Are you merging?
Compelling in the sense that you solve a real problem a target group of potential customers has with a product that is significantly better than the alternatives on that market. In my opinion no amount of clever marketing or chest beating at conferences can create a market if you don’t have an amazing product to begin with.
As a frequent advisor to new entrepreneurs and startups, I often hear your frustration with being treated differently from other startups by investors, on expectations for valuation , traction, and market size. On the other hand, if the market is super-hot, many will be willing to jump in to make your case.
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