Aug 28

Pretend you are on the board of a startup. Unfortunately, this startup is not living up to its potential, and is failing to get sales traction as you and the team hoped. Why are sales not materializing? I had a brief, but insightful, conversation with one of my partners today. This partner (like most venture capitalists) is on several startup boards. Most of these startups are growing quite well; however, one of them is not.

The question is why? From a board level, it is quite difficult for a venture capitalist to determine the cause of the startup’s sales slippage. Is it the sales team? Or is it a market/product issue?

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Jul 16

Knowing how to build your technical team when you’re founding a startup up but don’t have a technical background is challenging. I was reminded of this while I was having a few beers with Ariel Diaz, founder of YouCastr, a local startup focused on online sports broadcasting, and Todd Galloway, co-founder of Fafarazzi. Ariel is not a programmer or techie, but has managed to put together a solid technical team; Todd is technically solid and has also successfully hired several programmers. We were talking with another young CEO starting a business who had deep domain expertise and contacts, but who needed a technical person on his team.

When you are a non-techie starting a technology business, you’ve got two basic problems when you try to make your first technical addition to the team: 1) you haven’t got the network to easily find the right people; 2) you don’t know enough to evaluate the people you do find. (A third question is employee vs. co-founder, which I take a stab at below.)

Ariel’s basic advice was to acknowledge that you don’t know what you are doing, so you need to find the people who can help you. He aggressively networked with friends who were starting companies and he recommended using connections with schools you’ve attended (assuming they have a computer science department or an equivalent department focused on the technology you need.) If you’re luckly/good you can get them to help with both issues.

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