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

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

I love good causes and social entrepreneurs, but a recent pitch to me about eliminating world hunger with a new product (harvesting algae at low cost) seemed to forget that really hungry people don’t have any money. Present at trade shows and network with your ten-slide pitch to build your following.

Ideas 94

Ideas Slides Technical Review Patents 94

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

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 12, 2010

In the technology world there are a few websites that most startups track to keep up with the latest financings, acquisitions, product announcements and gossip: BusinessInsider, TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, etc. Specifically we talked about Slide having gotten a $550 million valuation before being sold to Google for $182 million.

Venture Capital 232

Venture Capital Slides Seed Funding Google 232

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

socalTECH

APRIL 26, 2017

One, is an upright, traditional looking microscopes, where you look at glass slides. We've created an alternative, a hybrid microscope for the price of one. What really separated us, was not the microscope, but how we very quickly sold out of our first three production runs of our microscope. Maybe that's even 99 percent.

Tech Coast Angels 124

Tech Coast Angels Startup Sales Slides 124

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 6, 2019

this seems like amongst the most valuable investment available because it’s not necessarily fully priced like a public-market investment. Here are some simple slides that outline the point: a. If you get into a high-growth company and you have asymmetric information on how the management team is performing?—?this Want some context?

Venture Capital 292

Venture Capital Capital Startup Funding 292

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

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

socalTECH

APRIL 26, 2017

One, is an upright, traditional looking microscopes, where you look at glass slides. We've created an alternative, a hybrid microscope for the price of one. What really separated us, was not the microscope, but how we very quickly sold out of our first three production runs of our microscope. Maybe that's even 99 percent.

Tech Coast Angels 100

Tech Coast Angels Startup Sales Slides 100

The Quigley Report

MARCH 4, 2008

VCs tend to put greater weight on the potential market size of the product being built, the reputations of the founders and the number of existing competitors than they do on swings (positive or negative) in the NASDAQ index. These firms most definitely do look at public stock market valuations as a measure of how to price a private company.

Startup 40

Startup Slides Marketing Clearstone 40

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 11, 2013

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. The easiest way to reduce chaos is to buffer all your activities (slow down), define safer generic processes, which spiral down productivity. Your products quickly become outdated.

Entrepreneur 105

Entrepreneur Slides IP Technology 105

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 23, 2014

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. The easiest way to reduce chaos is to buffer all your activities (slow down), define safer generic processes, which spiral down productivity. Your products quickly become outdated.

Startup 100

Startup Slides Entrepreneur IP 100

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

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. What is the business problem you are solving? What is your specific solution and value proposition?

Invest 108

Invest Startup Slides Equity 108

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 1, 2010

VentureHacks laid out the debate in a truly awesome interview & PowerPoint slides if you really want an in-depth understanding of the issue. The fact that I invest less just means the company is earlier stage and needed/wanted less or without a product/market fit we weren’t yet prepared to invest more heavily.

Seed Funding 298

Seed Funding Funding Venture Capital GRP Partners 298

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

InfoChachkie

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

When I went into work today, I didn''t realize that Monday morning we''re going to be pitching UPS on a big contract, on a product that, guess what, it doesn''t even exist. I was horrified, because I had all these people sending me money -- so I doubled the price, because I didn''t know what else to do. And I''m going to wing it.

Startup 223

Startup Yahoo Santa Barbara Slides 223

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 22, 2011

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. The easiest way to reduce chaos is to buffer all your activities (slow down), define safer generic processes, which spiral down productivity. Your products quickly become outdated.

Entrepreneur 95

Entrepreneur Slides IP Technology 95

socalTECH

FEBRUARY 26, 2016

By that time, I had figured out the cadence of pricing for hotel rooms, and had been traveling back and forth between LA and San Francisco for three or four days each week. Plus, prices were starting at $180. I got to live in Tel Aviv for four months with their product team, and I really got bit by the travel bug.

Startup 100

Startup Los Angeles Mobile Pricing 100

socalTECH

JUNE 16, 2010

My partner and I, Cliff Elion, have a patent pending neck technology, which enables the guitar to be made at a very accessible price point, and also have probably more functionality and connectivity than any device in history. What we found, in taking our product to the MTV awards, is our product is game changer.

Orange County 244

Orange County Startup Slides Paramount 244

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 21, 2010

BigCo calls you to review your product and decides they want to use you. A “warrant&# is a right, but not an obligation for a company to buy stock in your company at a future date and at a pre-agreed price. Let’s say you give a warrant to a channel partner to sell your product. Have minimums but a sliding scale.

Startup 298

Startup Sales Slides Metrics 298

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 2, 2015

The days of mass production and commodity pricing as an asset are gone. Companies that offer value beyond their product or service, for social and environmental good, are seen as leading the way forward to a shared future abundance. Develop a personal-engagement extraordinary service mentality.

Customer 55

Customer Custom Slides Commerce 55

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

I can’t tell you how many people have thanked me for this advice and say their productivity increased exponentially. It freed up Ophir to grow out our sales organization, to work more closely with agencies, to innovate on product and to raise capital. They can help you with pricing. Another thing entrepreneurs f**k up?

Outsource Development 150

Outsource Development Metrics Startup Sales 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 6, 2010

I was thumbing through Twitter messages on my Blackberry on Monday (I use Twitter as a “ mobile first, web second &# product) when I saw the following Tweet (see graphic). I thought Chris basically meant that investors know what most deals (not just their own) get done at so they have a pretty good sense how to price seed, A, B, etc.

Startup 294

Startup Sales Venture Capital Slides 294

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 11, 2009

Time to start thinking about how to make it more productive. If your valuation is already too high then seek approval to let them invest at a price lower than the current value. It’s OK to have the advisor slide where you glance quickly over the names. Too bad it was a bit superficial, though.

Startup 306

Startup Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 306

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 19, 2010

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. The easiest way to reduce chaos is to buffer all your activities (slow down), define safer generic processes, which spiral down productivity. Your products quickly become outdated.

Startup 57

Startup Slides Entrepreneur IP 57

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

No amount of persuasion would work so I asked simply if I could be staffed on one of his projects to teach some of his MBA geniuses about computer networks since they were working on defining telecom product offerings for the Internet age. Send me in a corner to work on slides, graphs, spreadsheets and charts. 25, ISDN, T3s, etc.

Technical Advisors 385

Technical Advisors Marketing Startup Venture Capital 385

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

AUGUST 25, 2009

This involves a person who leads a PowerPoint presentation in which the presenter feels more comfortable racing through pre-practiced slides and rattling off charts & bullet points than having a discussion. 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

Tech Zulu Event

MAY 9, 2014

Harnessing more energy from our grid by emphasizing efficiency, not increased factory and power production. Roam & Wander won me over as soon in the same way that the packed room of investors uttered a unanimous ‘aww’ during their slide deck presentation. In turn, Ohmconnect incentivizes its users with direct payments.

Startup 111

Startup Mobile Commerce Education 111

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. A post that I like is: " Tech Companies: Can You Explain Your Product to a Six-Year-Old? I was ready: 140 characters just wasn't doing if for me anymore.

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. If I see your alpha product then I can judge how it develops over time. I’m personally 70% management, 30% product.

Startup 360

Startup Venture Capital Invest Slides 360

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 15, 2010

We discussed in the video why they don’t price this money but give it as convertible debt) they don’t make announcements to the market. Arnie Gullov-Singh (ex-EVP of product, technology and operations for MySpace) also joined as CEO, as Sean Rad will assume the role of President. Short answer: no. They also avoid Reg D.

Venture Capital 285

Venture Capital Startup Advertising Redpoint 285

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

Fox bought MySpace for $580 million and then did a deal with Google worth more than the purchase price to serve up ads. MySpace would liked to have owned YouTube but didn’t have the public stock valuation to purchase them at the price that Google did. For a nanosecond Rupert Murdoch seemed like the smartest guy on the Internet.

Social Network 318

Social Network Networking Web 2.0 Startup 318