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This is the mysterious and dreaded duediligence process, which can kill the whole deal. Some entrepreneurs do very little to prepare for duediligence, assuming all the talking has already been done, and the business plan and results to-date tell the right story. My best advice is to stick to the middle ground.
Turn Your Organization Inside Out. As organizations we have become more open and I believe this is great for businesses and their customers. In the first 4 years of running BuildOnline we were an “Outside In&# organization. The Outside In organization had a one-way flow. But they went one step further.
Investors are very focused on diligence, on business models that make sense, and those companies that have a definite competitive advantage and defensibility to what they're doing. Mike Napoli: We've revised the way we review companies at the prescreening stage. The ideas and people seeking money are out there in quantity.
If you don’t have a good sales methodology already in place in your organization you might try reading that last link. Calling high means reaching the highest level appropriate person in an organization that you can reach to hear your pitch. In a small to mid-sized organization this is likely the CEO or perhaps a COO or SVP.
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. Talk about the technology behind your operations here? What''s your background and how did you end up at YP?
Part I of this series describes the 360-review that I conducted at a growing, dynamic SaaS business which has recently graduated from the startup stage and entered the early-growth phase. One of the most compelling conclusions I drew from the reviews is that both Founders need delegate more of their day-to-day tasks.
I could have listened to her for hours as many of her lessons were ones I hadn’t heard before such as how she used online gaming when she was younger as a way of both teaching herself tech as well as learning to lead remote teams. Nanea Reeves has a storied career in senior leadership roles at technology companies.
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. Talk about the technology behind your operations here? Louis and Atlanta.
This is the mysterious and dreaded duediligence process, which can kill the whole deal. Some entrepreneurs do very little to prepare for duediligence, assuming all the talking has already been done, and the business plan and results to-date tell the right story. My best advice is to stick to the middle ground.
I'd suggest: Startup CTO or Developer , Startup Founder Developer Gap , Part-Time CTO , Technology Advisor , CTO Founder , Acting CTO. I've organized the LA CTO Forum (a private group of 150+ CTOs in Los Angeles) for 10+ years. Interviewing them is also tough, especially if you are not yourself technical. This is a must.
The Tech Coast Angels , Southern California's most active , organized angel investment group, has a goal: cut down the time it takes to fund a startup presenting to the organization.
We all like to think of startups as “non hierarchic&# organizations and to some extent that should be true. I never built a Google-sized business but I did build an organization from scratch that grew to 120 employees in 5 countries before we sold it. I’m not a big believer in too much hierarchy.
Struggling entrepreneurs are often so happy to get a funding offer that they neglect the recommended reverse duediligence on the investors. Investor duediligence on a startup is not a mysterious black art, but is nothing more than a final integrity check on all aspects of your business model, team, product, customers, and plan.
For the last week of the year, we're featuring the thoughts and reflections of some of the movers and shakers of Southern California's high tech community. We asked the same four questions of a variety of top technology entrepreneurs, investors, and others, to hear what they're thinking about, and are sharing it here over the next week.
This is the mysterious and dreaded duediligence process, which can kill the whole deal. Some entrepreneurs do very little to prepare for duediligence, assuming all the talking has already been done, and the business plan and results to-date tell the right story. My best advice is to stick to the middle ground.
If you seek funds from an organized investment group such as an angel fund, venture capital entity, or even an investment club, the first thing you want to do is to find one person to buy into your vision, become excited by your enthusiasm and be willing to become the internal champion for your fund-raising effort.
From strollers to high tech, I will distill the best products and services and offer them to the influential Mommy Blogger community for reviews, commentary and endorsements. I will share these great products with the Mommy Bloggers in my network for reviews, sponsored posts, links and advertisements. Win win win.
I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies. Of course, I have an advantage because I organize the LA CTO Forum. What are the biggest areas of technical risk? What technology research is required? How can we address this risk?
I'd suggest: Startup CTO or Developer , Startup Founder Developer Gap , Part-Time CTO , Technology Advisor , CTO Founder , Acting CTO. I've organized the LA CTO Forum (a private group of 150+ CTOs in Los Angeles) for 10+ years. Interviewing them is also tough, especially if you are not yourself technical. This is a must.
Struggling entrepreneurs are often so happy to get a funding offer that they neglect the recommended reverse duediligence on the investors. Investor duediligence on a startup is not a mysterious black art, but is nothing more than a final integrity check on all aspects of your business model, team, product, customers, and plan.
For the past several years I’ve undertaken many initiatives to “get more organized,” which basically means to make another attempt at implementing and running a solid task list that I can share with others with whom I collaborate. I didn’t want to roll it out too broadly in our organization until I had tested it.
While I have some sympathy with not investing too heavily in sales people until the product has properly been tested and commercialized in the enterprise environment, in the end it’s a fact that it takes sales people to move product through large organizations. These are the lifeblood of your sales organization.
NASA has a big message for Elon Musk , the technology mogul behind Los Angeles-based rocket firm SpaceX : smoke marijuana on a podcast again, and SpaceX will lose its opportunity to launch astronauts into space. READ MORE>>.
The “span of control” for a growing tech startup is probably 6-9 people. The “doers” in your organization. You help them prioritize their objectives and review the results. You motivate, cajole, reassign tasks, hire, fire and push the organization forward. You set direction. You hire great people.
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.
Periodically we do portfolio reviews to evaluate whether we have enough diversified risk across the fund. One such theme was “water conservation” and we morphed it into a broader theme of agriculture technology or “ag tech” for short. We look at stage, geography and of course sector. 6SensorLabs.
According to a recent Forbes article , UC Santa Barbara''s Technology Management Program offers students a superior startup education over the University of Pennsylvania (home of Wharton), as well Harvard, Northwestern and even its acclaimed southern neighbor, the University of Southern California. Organic Academia. Techpreneurs.
Some firms have said that they’re going to turn to HBCUvc , a nonprofit organization that helps students from historically Black colleges and universities enter venture and tech. Just two weeks ago, HBCUVc was struggling to keep staff on deck due to the financial impact of COVID-19. Among the strategies?
It influenced a generation of tech marketers. The book popularized the technology adoption lifecycle curve that originally came out of Iowa State University shown below. So the early part of a technology company is about finding your hard core group of early adopters and making them passionate about your products.
Seattle should be the envy of any non Silicon Valley tech community in the country. It really wouldn’t take much to turn a great technology ecosystem into a truly electric one. Community Leaders + Organizers. The ingredients are all here. As I gear up to give a keynote at the annual Seattle 2.0
awe.sm (I have been an investor since 2009) has always provided these data through an API to allow developers to have social analytics embedded in their products or for internal use in their organization to drive more effective campaigns. The other major pilot customer was. I have been using the basic awe.sm And so forth.
Struggling entrepreneurs are often so happy to get a funding offer that they neglect the recommended reverse duediligence on the investors. Investor duediligence on a startup is not a mysterious black art, but is nothing more than a final integrity check on all aspects of your business model, team, product, customers, and plan.
The Upfront Summit, the high tech and venture capital company run by Upfront Ventures, has been delayed, the latest victim of resurging COVID-19 numbers and the Omicron variant. Upfront's last tech conference, in 2020, was held at the Rose Bowl.
Given customers & sales are the lifeblood of any organization you’d imagine everybody would respect their customers. But if you want to build a fast-growing, tech-enabled startup it’s hard to imagine doing so without venture capital and lambasting VCs publicly probably isn’t the most thoughtful strategy.
Earlier this week, the Tech Coast Angels , the largest and most active organized angel group in Southern California, announced a new effort to create an angel group network, which will share and syndicate deals between groups--current the TCA, Golden Seeds, and Band of Angels. Richard Sudek: It could happen a number of different ways.
Every year, we feature the year end reflections of founders, CEOs, investors, sposors, and others in Southern California's high tech community. As you may recall the Alliance's mission is to elevate the region as a global leader in innovation, technology & entrepreneurship. We've been posting these throughout the next two weeks.
The technology team disagrees on direction and wants resolutions. Getting suppliers to accept terms that they said they never normally agree, getting accepted to speak on a panel when the conference organizer initially said “no,&# getting people to moonlight for you until you have the cash to bring them on board.
Applications are due April 6th, 2010, the form is on the website and the Twitter address is @launchpadlad. Encourage the most successful LA tech entrepreneurs who had previously started companies to get involved as mentors, instructors or just informal advisors. We will be selecting 10 startup companies to participate. We connected.
If you seek funds from an organized investment group such as an angel fund, venture capital entity, or even an investment club, the first thing you want to do is to find one person to buy into your vision, become excited by your enthusiasm and be willing to become the internal champion for your fund-raising effort.
XPRIZE , the nonprofit organization which has been using large dollar prize competitions to spur innovation in a wide range of areas, has booted up a brand new, $2M prize around ocean health, the group said this week. The XPRIZE Foundation said that.
During the holiday season, our tradition over the last few years has been to post reflections on the past year and some predictions for 2019 from Southern California's technology industry. What was the biggest news for your organization in 2018? What was the biggest lesson you learned this year?
Angel investors, particularly those in organized angel groups, are typically former entrepreneurs who have had successful liquidity events in their pasts, or executives of companies who’ve retired with the funds from their stock options. The result of these surveys over time is universally the same. a 33% discount. www.berkus.com.
seems like an unlikely place to grow one of the next billion-dollar startups in the booming Los Angeles tech ecosystem. Mahdessian and Kuzoyan met on a ski trip organized by the Armenian student associations at Stanford and the University of Southern California back when both men were in college. The city of Glendale, Calif.
Matthew Jenusaitis: Overall, I am real happy with the first year, both from a personal point of view, as well as for the organization. Clearly, 2009 was not a good year, from the perspective of the technology innovation ecosystem. For OCTANe to be successful, we want to see our technology ecosystem grow.
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