Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 5, 2010

Having street smarts with no inspirational ability to build teams can yield a great small business but will be difficult to scale into a large VC-backed business. So we as VCs search for entrepreneurs/founders who have the whole package or as much of it as possible. In the book they profile how VC worked in the early days (60s / 70s).

Entrepreneur 293

Entrepreneur Startup Venture Capital CTO Hire 293

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

As your organization grows and you hire senior staff where you are no longer managing every employee directly the issue of how to manage people that are not your “direct&# reports arises. This applies to both founders and to VC’s that work with them. I see two common mistakes in companies (not just in startups, in fact).

Startup 308

Startup CTO Coach Technical Review CTO Hire 308

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 30, 2014

Today I’m handing her the largest A-round check I’ve ever written as a VC as we lead her $10 million A-Round at uBeam. 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.

Technical Review 418

Technical Review Software Review CTO Hire IP 418

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

The truth is you really don’t know how your teammates or your bosses will perform in good times and bad. You hire people who look good on paper. You join teams that got good write-ups on TechCrunch, have great VCs, have star CEO’s, whatever. Working hard together at a big company just isn’t the same.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Startup CTO Coach Venture Capital 320

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

Much has been written about when it is time to hire a “professional CEO” to run a startup company and of course that has long been a norm in Silicon Valley when founders find that their inexperience may be a limiting factor in company growth ( know as the Peter Principle ). Onward & upward DataSift. Startup Lessons'

CTO Hire 309

CTO Hire Organization Google Course 309

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 5, 2011

Your highest priority right now is hiring the 1 or 2 people that are going to join your company and make a difference. There’s you and your killer CTO co-founder. I need to take some VC meetings. I just don’t have enough time to focus on it right now. The business leaders need to do their parts.

Venture Capital 317

Venture Capital Technical Review Startup Press 317

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 5, 2010

Great content again in September that meets at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. Chris Dixon , September 12, 2010 My most useful career experience was about eight years ago when I was trying to break into the world of VC-backed startups. I got rejected from every single one. It’s great advice.

Startup 191

Startup Product Technology Venture Capital 191

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

By spending more time educating your board on your business you get more valuable advice from them. Your goal should be to turn your VCs into extended members of your team to get real value from them. In his spare time he raised nearly $30 million. Ask your VC to send a critical email to a contact. Rob does it.

Tips 365

Tips Email Venture Capital CTO Coach 365

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 1, 2014

He hired his co-founder and CTO Adam LeVasseur who set out to build systems to allow you to see all of your storage items in a beautiful app but also to build tech for logistics, driver management, customer service, billing and so forth. Sam moved back to NY and we announced our seed round of capital, which we led.

Technical Review 380

Technical Review Software Review CTO Hire Startup 380

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. You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. He looked stunned.

Entrepreneur 414

Entrepreneur Technical Review Slides CTO Coach 414

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 23, 2017

The perverse nature of raising capital is that “no’s” almost always precede “yeses” because it’s very easy for a VC to tell you that you’re not a good fit without doing any real work to evaluate your company so you hear “no” far before others start doing more work. The best VCs follow up but then so, too, to the best entrepreneurs.

Funding 238

Funding Venture Capital Startup Course 238

socalTECH

FEBRUARY 2, 2018

HyreCar's CEO is Joe Furnani, and its CTO is Abhi Arora. HyreCar's service lets drivers rent cars which they can use to drive for Uber and Lyft, with no contracts and no sign up fees. That earlier equity funding had a target of $2.975M, and had included 62 investors as of November. READ MORE>>.

CTO Hire 157

CTO Hire Funding Equity Los Angeles 157

SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

August was a slow month in terms of traffic and I was away for a lot of the month, but there were some really great posts at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. While I agree that many VCs are crummy seed investors, I think there are some that are excellent seed investors. m the f%*kin’ boss.”.

Startup 191

Startup Venture Capital Blogging CTO Hire 191

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

years as a VC, “You don’t want to raise money from me. They got their round done anyway from a big late-stage VC. One of the large parts of the burn was PR, Marketing and attending conferences. Bad VCs funded this madness in the first place and weren’t close enough to the company to see what was going on.

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur Startup CTO Hire Sales 286

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network) - 500 Hats , November 1, 2010 I've held off writing this post for a long time, because I couldn't quite get my head around all the issues. I'm Tired of Creating Your Content - Babbling VC , November 12, 2010 Jeff triggered this post in regards to his Check-in Fatigue on Foursquare.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Startup Product Technology 175

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Because I am true to the hiring practices I preach, I wanted a strong exec who would “ punch above their weightclass ” by taking a job they hadn’t yet done but would hugely aspire to and thus work harder to out perform. And we wanted a head of global marketing. It’s more convenient for both sides.

CTO Coach 359

CTO Coach Google CTO Hire Yammer 359

socalTECH

MARCH 8, 2013

Now, I think we're seeing major companies who see that this is great, are doing pilot projects, and see the value they are getting, and realize what they need to do is go mainstream, and broaden access to all of that data to a much larger part of their organiation--and do that, ideally, without hiring hundreds of data scientists.

Incubator 208

Incubator Startup CTO Hire Ideas 208

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2013

Our industry just took one big step towards legitimacy with the hiring of renowned media exec Ynon Kreiz to run Maker Studios. This followed an investment late last year by Time Warner in the company in a round totaling $36 million , led by Rachel Lam , head of their investment group. billion deal to Disney.

Media 320

Media CTO Coach CTO Hire Los Angeles 320

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). I'm a bit of an anti-VC, as you know. So, I've been hiring people and creating an organization around that.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Entrepreneur Technical Review Software Review 100

socalTECH

JANUARY 3, 2011

So, we put something together, and put in some money, and literally the next day I was out to breakfast with Josh Roth, the former CTO of Rent.com and NTI Group, and Josh was also looking for something to do. So, with this funding, are you planning any hiring? I have said I'd mortgage my house to hire an awesome programmer.

Newsletter 216

Newsletter Startup CTO Hire Blogging 216

SoCal CTO

JULY 13, 2011

This site aggregates and filters content from thought leaders who talk about topics such as Marketing , Sales , Design , Revenue , Hiring , Social Media , Business Models , Metrics , PR , Venture Capital , Angel Investors , Bootstrapping , Incubators , Agile and many others.

Content 175

Content Startup Social Media IP 175

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 9, 2020

Level of responsibility and time allocated. Co-founders only able to work part-time, with responsibility and major income sources elsewhere, don’t carry the same risk as others with more operational responsibility. The CTO of many technical startups was the original founder.

Startup 174

Startup Equity Patents CTO Hire 174

Tech.Co

JULY 12, 2016

Brogan Bambrogan, the colorful cofounder of futuristic travel startup Hyperloop, left his position as CTO at the company less than two weeks ago. Shervin Pishevar’s venture capital firm, Sherpa Capital, is a repeat investor in Hyperloop One.” Today, he’s suing a former colleague for harassment.

CTO Hire 70

CTO Hire Buzzfeed Venture Capital News 70

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 23, 2014

After my first Tweet with the Notorious mothafucka quote , I thought about my role as a VC and I Tweeted the following. I spent an hour on the phone working with Sam Rosen, the CEO of MakeSpace on a senior exec he is considering hiring. It came from my weekend activities.

Networking 366

Networking Startup CTO Coach Email 366

socalTECH

MARCH 31, 2014

I was hired to head up strategy, marketing development, and product management. I got involved with talking to CTOs at large, Fortune 500 companies, introducing them to what this system could provide, and figuring out if they have this capability. Yuri Pikover was the lead investor in that company, and become the CEO.

Orange County 245

Orange County Startup News IBM 245

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 led us to venture capital as opposed to trying to bootstrap ourselves. Hiring is difficult no matter where you are.

Cloud Computing 188

Cloud Computing Santa Barbara EC2 Startup 188

socalTECH

MARCH 26, 2014

I founded that with the former CTO of my first company, Kevin Smilak, who now works at Google. We were hired by a company that did outsourced medical billing and consulting for physicial medicine and rehab doctors. Dan Rodrigues: Yes, we''ve raised around $70M in venture funding to date. Back to Kareo--what''s next for you?

Startup 160

Startup El Segundo CTO Hire Outsource Development 160

socalTECH

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Now, despite bootstrapping, you actually have some connections to the venture capital world, don't you? Ramit Varma: I've been sort of in and out of the venture space since we started. My brother is actually at Anthem Ventures, working with Bill Woodward, and I was an intern there in business school.

Software Review 178

Software Review Technical Review Education Startup 178

InfoChachkie

JULY 14, 2011

At CallWave, Colin was CTO, Jason was CFO and I was in charge of product marketing and customer acquisition. When we raised our Series A, we put a lot of effort into meeting with VC’s to find the right fit for us. We met with a ton of VC’s and angels. We’re always hiring great people.

Marketing 209

Marketing Advertising Paid Search Startup 209

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 1, 2023

Level of responsibility and time allocated. Cofounders only able to work part-time, with responsibility and major income sources elsewhere, don’t carry the same risk as others with more operational responsibility. The CTO of many technical startups was the original founder.

Equity 99

Equity Patents CTO Hire Startup 99

Tech Zulu Event

FEBRUARY 11, 2013

s first accelerator called The Fort and raised VC funding. They took the “Match.com for entrepreneurs” model literally and hired the former CTO of Match.com to create the algorithms to help predict and recommend matches. Soon after CoFoundersLab was accepted into D.C.’s They offered both the online and offline events for free.

Entrepreneur 87

Entrepreneur Santa Monica Startup CTO Hire 87

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 4, 2014

Level of responsibility and time allocated. Co-founders only able to work part-time, with responsibility and major income sources elsewhere, don’t carry the same risk as others with more operational responsibility. The CTO of many technical startups was the original founder.

Equity 104

Equity Patents Startup CTO Hire 104

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 10, 2018

Level of responsibility and time allocated. Co-founders only able to work part-time, with responsibility and major income sources elsewhere, don’t carry the same risk as others with more operational responsibility. The CTO of many technical startups was the original founder.

Equity 95

Equity Patents CTO Hire Startup 95

SoCal Delicious

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Main February 23, 2010 Advice for CTO Founders: Dont Let Business Kill the Business Founding a technology company is an amazing thing. Too often, however, I have found CTO / Founders paired with business people who not only don't add value, but frequently detract from the value of the business. So my advice to CTO / Founders?

CTO Coach 28

CTO Coach CTO Hire Outsource Development Mentor 28

socalTECH

NOVEMBER 25, 2008

I just went out to a VC conference out in New York, and what I'll say is -- it was just too damn easy. There were companies at the VC conference starving for money, but I think we could have raised $20M like nothing. It's a great time for that, because there's lots of talent out there.

Startup 113

Startup CTO Hire Resource Venture Capital 113

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 16, 2016

His co-founder and COO, Andy Berman , made the smart move from being a young VC to becoming an entrepreneur. The CTO, Tor Ivry , heads engineering out of Israel.

Invest 150

Invest Course Startup CTO Hire 150

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 24, 2016

Level of responsibility and time allocated. Co-founders only able to work part-time, with responsibility and major income sources elsewhere, don’t carry the same risk as others with more operational responsibility. The CTO of many technical startups was the original founder.

Equity 62

Equity Startup Patents CTO Hire 62