“Stop this company before you develop its product – you have already wrecked your equity allocation and cap table with your handshake deals. Find another company to build.” (He did.)
“This is a fine company but it is a “back-bedroom” lifestyle business. It will make you and your founding team a nice living [...]

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Keeping your perspective that your venture is but one part of a larger, more complex market is essential to success. Understanding your company’s position and value in the supply chain allows you to make the correct decisions about what power you have in a negotiation, how to craft a win-win deal that keeps the other [...]

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In our fast-moving world of sound bites, information overwhelm, time-shifting and 24/7 availability, it is rare for a CEO to hear any advice that includes having patience. But you must have it, and the capital to sustain it, or your company will fail.
You don’t have to build your entire vision all at once, or at [...]

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Perseverance for the technology entrepreneur is tricky ~ you must sustain your energy and your vision, but adapt to a fast changing market without losing ground on what you have created. And this condition persists throughout the life of your company and career. So perseverance for the technology CEO is not just in the early [...]

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“An entrepreneur is someone who has lost one, won one, and started at third company,” I said once to my new client.
“I’ve lost two and started a third, does that count?” (yes, that counts.)
There are dreamers and doers. The first-time entrepreneur could be either — only time and experience and actions will tell.
Dreamers
Dreamers think large, [...]

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Folks don’t talk directly about “honor” anymore, not out loud, except perhaps in the military. It isn’t common language. But honor plays a part in every interaction, and is the basis for our enduring reputation in our community.
Perhaps the concept closest to honor is a current word (a marketing term in social media actually), “authentic.” [...]

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The burden of initial success in an early stage company sits on the shoulders of the CEO. Beyond your domain expertise, leadership and financial savvy, you must be able to pitch and close – that is, sell. You must sell your vision for your company and its future success, and you must sell your early [...]

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We live in a capitalist society. We build businesses. For all the adjacent reasons to build a business – inventing the next new thing, changing the world, advancing humankind – a business must make money, create profit, and keep growing (or at least bettering) itself.
For this you must understand the numbers, even if you can’t [...]

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To be a successful CEO, you should have innate personal power, and leadership should be in your nature. Yes, certain skills of leadership can be learned, or refined, but you should want to lead, and leading should feel like an integral part of your “being in the world.”
Your qualities of leadership (combined with your personal [...]

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Of all the characteristics of success for CEOs, the most critical is their domain expertise –whether it is technology, retail, green/clean or bio-tech.  And that domain expertise should be specific to the product being built or the service being offered — software development, social media, SaaS, medical devices, bio fuels, and so on.
If the CEO does [...]

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