Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 2, 2014

I can assure you that move wasn’t a walk in the park for the board. First, I recently read the must-read book Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton. I’m friends with several people in the book and I’m sure they didn’t love being written about – nobody ever does in this sort of book. Foursquare?

startup 385

startup coworking advice leadership 385

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 12, 2014

If you publish a book, how do you get on the NY Times best seller list? Simply write a great book? But can you be rich and simply buy enough books to be on the list? So there are consultants who have armies of contractors around the country who can go and buy small batches of your book at many locations – all for a fee.

peer-to-peer 379

peer-to-peer mix-use consulting advice 379

Entrepreneurs' Organization

JULY 6, 2020

I interviewed a number of prominent VC’s and entrepreneurs for my recent book. Here is advice I collected for dealing with the stress of running a startup: 1. Brad Feld, a partner at Foundry Group and investor in many successful startups, gave me this piece of advice. Remember that you are not alone.

peer-to-peer 321

peer-to-peer startup advice entrepreneurs 321

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 13, 2010

I bought the most popular book on the topic, “ The Mind of the Strategist &# by Kenichi Ohmae, who is ex McKinsey. I found this book very useful but still a little bit hard to implement. The book is expensive but for me personally this helped me enormously. Tags: Startup Advice. I’m glad I read it though.

entrepreneurs 372

entrepreneurs consulting frameworks advice 372

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

You’re not lecturing to a college class, you’re not at a cocktail party and you’re not chatting with a small group in a board meeting. She wrote the book that inspired the way that people at McKinsey and Accenture do presentations. But seriously her book is spot on. You’re on stage!

advice 362

advice VC entrepreneurs education 362

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 17, 2019

I understand that Adam Grant is a fairly popular professor at Wharton and has a book that some people loved called “Originals” (for me it interesting but not mind blowing, and I have some first-hand knowledge of some of its inaccuracies). I think his advice is this op-ed is bananas. No, it’s not fun. Why does this happen?

advice 250

advice board pitching startup accelerator 250

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 14, 2010

It’s sort of like having an Encyclopedic history book before just launching your product and seeing whether anybody uses it. Here’s the thing – as Michael Lewis talks about in his book, the adage of investing is that “if you’re reading about something in the papers it’s already too late.”. Part three will be published shortly.

angel investing 288

angel investing investment investing advice 288

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

Yet after a seed round of $2 million many are still doing Quickbooks entries, booking hotels & airplane tickets, negotiating offices leases and digging through employment benefits, legal contracts and such. I can’t tell you how many people have thanked me for this advice and say their productivity increased exponentially.

board 338

board energy financing finance 338

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 25, 2010

I recently read a book I’d highly recommend to every reader of this blog called “ Yes, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive &# by Robert B. Cialdini who is also author of a very well received book called “ Influence &# (which I plan to read). You should, too. (no, This is all explicit decision making.

strategy 293

strategy venture capital SaaS investing 293

This is going to be BIG.

MAY 5, 2023

To put that timeframe in perspective, here’s a picture of analyst me taken at USV’s first office in 2005, dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt versus a picture of me, a GP at my own firm, over 100 deals later, now on my latest Zoom board call from my couch at home with my junior analyst of about a year and a half.

ventures 545

ventures investment investing VC 545

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 21, 2021

So this work to find the right pairing is critical and is a lot of the work that board members do with the founders and their leadership team in startups. But going back to my friend and his advice that I started this post with, it is true that operational leadership alone will not get the job done. Most are not.

leadership 279

leadership VC advice sustainability 279

Revolution

MAY 4, 2022

Many times, optimism would be dashed by another Covid-19 variant that would wipe out bookings for the quarter. As board members, there were many hard conversations and no easy answers. We leaned in during weekly board meetings and reinvested when others left the cap table.

real estate 264

real estate coworking spaces coworking hospitality 264

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 17, 2012

And they will offer you some of the best business advice you will ever receive if you’re open to it. One day if you’re lucky you’ll be big enough to work with recruiters to hire senior members of your team or your board. And it’s not just lawyers. EXECUTIVE RECRUITERS. EXECUTIVE COACHES.

startup 363

startup real estate VC venture capital 363

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 25, 2013

bang on the windows of a board meeting recently and stick his tongue out at all of us. It’s something you’d imagine working best on a tablet where the parents take digital assets (think: photos & stickers) and engage with their children in story telling, arts-and-crafts, scrap-booking and the like. Startup Advice'

startup 398

startup creativity advice entrepreneurs 398

Entrepreneurs' Organization

FEBRUARY 9, 2022

Given the request for input and feedback, you might expect a presenter to receive various advice from the other Forum members. However, most Forum organizations train members to specifically avoid giving advice. Under an advice framework, my Forum-mates take turns telling me what I should do in my specific situation.

peer-to-peer 278

peer-to-peer advice frameworks accelerator 278

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 23, 2014

And I spoke with the CTO of another great company I used to be on the board of and enlisted his support in potentially being an advisor to one company. The following post is advice I gave to my good friend Sam Teller when he was just a junior baller, “ Never Ask a Busy Person to Lunch.” ” You simply need to ask. .”

networking 366

networking peer-to-peer advice mentorship 366

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

I will even take to emailing people I don’t know offering small bits of advice. I shifted my thinking a few years ago after I read Tim Ferris’s book The Four Hour Workweek (link is to a short summary I wrote). I had a 3-hour board meeting with another. If you do randomly write me I have advice. Is that OK?

advice 314

advice culture board VC 314

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 4, 2013

He then brought her to board meetings so nobody could accuse him of not having a business model. He calls this competing with “non consumption” It was the most profound business strategy book I had read and greatly influenced how I thought about company building and certainly how I think about investing. Startup Advice'

strategy 401

strategy startup peer-to-peer advice 401

David Teten VC

JUNE 9, 2021

You can work as a consultant, an interim executive, a board member, a deal executive partnering to buy a company, an executive in residence, or as an entrepreneur in residence. . As a next step, we recommend that you register at the major expert network websites, as well as LinkedIn and job boards, if you haven’t already.

consulting 128

consulting venture capital board capital 128

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 18, 2010

The concept comes from a Stephen Covey book called “ First Things First ,&# which is a worthwhile book ( Wikipedia overview here ) but if you haven’t read his seminal book “ 7 Habits of Highly Effective People &# you should start with that. Tags: Startup Advice. Here’s what I learned.

mentorship 374

mentorship creativity energy entrepreneurs 374

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 25, 2011

But when you’re in the mood to draw in a few new sources for entrepreneurship you might consider these two books non-traditional books on entrepreneurship that had an impact on me. He talks about this early in the book as a foreshadowing technique. These topics all feature in the book. American Pastoral by Philip Roth. (I

entrepreneurship 334

entrepreneurship entrepreneurs culture education 334

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2019

I’m going to focus this post around the concept of a “board dinner” or “board lunch” since this is part of a series around how to more effectively run board relationships but most of these tips can be broadly applied. Why a Board Dinner (or Lunch)? Managing a board is a bit like flying?—?the

networking 262

networking board construction disruption 262

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

One of the books that first made me aware of the “creative brain&# was “ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain &# by Betty Edwards. All are known creativity drivers and are covered in the book mentioned above. She literally encourages you to draw things upside down. For others they swear by music.

creativity 356

creativity frameworks media innovation 356

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 20, 2012

Board Meetings. How do VCs break out of group think when they are shuttling from one board meeting to the next, from one conference to the other and talking with all the same people? I learned about this behavior and how to channel it from my favorite book about ADHD, Delivered from Distraction. Conferences.

creativity 400

creativity venture capital entrepreneurs board 400

Entrepreneurs' Organization

DECEMBER 11, 2020

5000 shared: Knowing what you know now, what advice would you share with your younger self? I also have a physical “to do” book and a system for jotting things down and crossing them off that I follow religiously. It’s been like having my own board of directors, for both my business and personal life. 4,672 on the 2020 Inc.

media 298

media culture creativity energy 298

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JULY 9, 2019

I am reading a friend’s book which is still in proofs and so I’m not going to talk about it yet. But there is one part of the book that really rang true for me and that is when he talks about certain kinds of problematic employees, particularly one he calls The Heretic. You have to find a way out of the heretic mess.

coworking 186

coworking advice board strategy 186

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2011

And having too much money certainly raises board expectations that you will do big things quickly. No board is going to give you $25 million up front and then expect your year-one staff expenditures to be $2 million. If you’re a startup or product person and haven’t read his book Four Steps to Epiphany please do.

entrepreneurs 374

entrepreneurs incubation board VC 374

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 14, 2010

So my first advice is not to rush in the fund raising process. Don’t take my advice, take Eric Clapton’s. I play open book. It’s the partner, not the firm – Firms have brands but brands don’t attend board meetings – partners do. Not so in venture capital. I’m the same.

VC 298

VC advice venture capital entrepreneurs 298

Y Combinator

MARCH 7, 2023

YC Group Partner Surbhi Sarna has written a book called Without a Doubt , and today it goes on sale. I have no idea how Surbhi managed to write a book while also being a Group Partner at YC (a more-than-full-time job!). It's a must-read for anyone interested in healthcare.

entrepreneurship 97

entrepreneurship culture advice health 97

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 22, 2010

Some other entrepreneurs who went down the MBA, consulting or banking routes without working at a startup are certainly book smart but haven’t always refined the street-smart skills needed to be an effective entrepreneur. Tags: Startup Advice This Week in Venture Capital. There are many analogies here for software development.

entrepreneurs 356

entrepreneurs media creativity VC 356

TechCrunch

JULY 14, 2021

Anyone , an audio app that’s building a ‘marketplace for advice’ one five-minute phone call at a time, is launching new versions of its iOS and Android apps today* and beginning to large-scale onboarding after operating in a limited closed beta for the past six months. It’s one-to-one only.

advice 99

advice networking sustainability communities 99

Entrepreneurs' Organization

JULY 27, 2020

For companies ranking in the top quartile of executive-board diversity, returns on equity (ROEs) were 53 percent higher, on average, than they were for those in the bottom quartile … earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margins at the most diverse companies were 14 percent higher, on average, than those of the least diverse companies.”.

peer-to-peer 237

peer-to-peer leadership culture communities 237

Gust

OCTOBER 26, 2014

He published a book with Ron Porter, titled “ Bootstrap Business ”, that provides a wealth of practical examples and advice on this subject. I like his approach, and have extracted some tips from his book and other sources on how to do it: Use a virtual office. When you let them on board, you lose control of your destiny.

startup 176

startup creativity entrepreneurs advice 176

Berkonomics

SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

Announcing EIGHT new mini-books and eBooks by Master Entrepreneur, Dave Berkus , just released by The Berkus Press. Covering important business growth subjects, these books are a must-have for you and your associates. Individual books from The Berkus Press by clicking HERE. BUILDING GREAT BOARDS. Advisory boards.

board 67

board construction strategy creativity 67

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 17, 2011

If I bring them on board now, how do I not reduce the motivation from those that I have already hired? The best book I ever read on this topic was Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos). It’s a must read and has great advice on building a company culture. How do I motivate them? • Don’t over-sell.

startup 399

startup culture innovation advice 399

Dream It

APRIL 3, 2020

In addition to his books, Geoffrey Moore assisted in writing “In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers” for the Harvard Business Review in 2009. Identify a problem that resonates with the decision-maker at your target organization Moore recommends that you put yourself in the shoes of the CEO or Board of Directors. What are they ignoring?

pitching 221

pitching strategy advice board 221

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2009

I don’t think it takes book smart people to build great companies – sometimes it’s a hindrance. I advocated LOUDLY at the board that we needed to cut our burn rate. And I asked to leave the board. Tags: Start-up Advice. Street Smarts - OK, so you’re a tenacious person – you never give up.

entrepreneurs 306

entrepreneurs board advice consulting 306