In the early days of my career, my definition of success was pretty run-of-the-mill. It was all based in corporate metrics while I managed to build three profitable startups. But then my middle child, Teddy, was born with a life-threatening congenital diaphragmatic hernia, and everything changed.
My wife and I started the Incredible Teddy Foundation to help raise awareness about CDH and give financial assistance to families. After a difficult period, our son is doing well now. But his struggle brought me to completely redefine what success meant to me. No longer is it set just by business achievements, but by giving back — the classic “doing good while doing well.”
The experience of building a charitable fou...
One of our favorite interviews we’ve done was with Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang. Not just because of what he’s done, but because of the time we did it.
There are a lot of interesting moments in history to interview Yang — ours was just after Alibaba went public in the largest global IPO in tech history.
This was a massive vindication for Yang, who originally brought the deal to Yahoo!, and argued against Yahoo! selling half of its stake off years later. He needed the vindication: Yang was supposed to be the Steve Jobs founder hero coming in to save Yahoo! back in 2008. He initially turned down a $40 billion acquisition by Microsoft, was eventually ousted as CEO, and Yahoo!’s long slide continued.
It’s hard to assess his legacy: On the one h...
In my tech career, I had the opportunity to experience hackathons from many different angles: as a participant, an organizer, a sponsor; a process advisor and technology provider; in plenty of cases as a winner or leader of winning teams; with both startup and corporate contexts.
I’ve experienced the challenges in leading talented teams under the time pressure of a hackathon; the stress levels of pitching ideas to leadership teams. Here is my advice to those ambitious hackathon participants:
No matter the type (corporate or public one) a hackathon is always a great opportunity to showcase your talent and skills: yes, hackathons are also about team spirit, collaboration and fun but the primary motivation of the typical participant is to win...
When times are good at our startups, we think it will never change; when times are bad, we think it will never change.
Yet the only constant with startups is change.
The challenge for many Founders is that this is likely the first time we've had good or bad times, so we have yet to see a full cycle. That makes it difficult to know whether this is a short-term blip or a long-term trend. As such, we tend to grossly overcompensate by spending too much in good times and running for the hills in bad times.
We all have this fantasy that our startups constantly grow "up and to the right!" on our beautiful charts. The reality is way different. The best way to think about our startup journey is a constant cycle of "feast o...
Welcome to Phase Two of a four-part Splitting Equity Series. If you missed it, start your journey here: Introduction - Early Startup Equity — Getting it Right before continuing on if you haven’t already, and go in order from there.
Phase One - Startup Equity - Avoiding Early Mistakes
Phase Two - Part 1 - How Startup Equity Works ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Part 2 - Startup Stock Options
Part 3 -Startup Stock Vesting
Phase Three - How to Split Equity
Phase Four - Equity Management
Let's continue!
Startup companies have been wrestling with how to structure stock ownership forever. As private companies we have major decisions to make, from raising venture capital to awarding key employees with equity to just splitting equity among co-founders — we need a stru...
Building a weekend side project or an MVP to validate your startup is not as hard as you think. Whether you’ve never written a line of code in your life or your GitHub profile link is in your Twitter bio, there are existing tools that you can use to build your initial product in a day and sometimes even a few hours! I’ll share some of these with you that make up my MVP toolkit.
First, let’s focus on what I think is one of the most important considerations and that is validation. Your whole goal when building an MVP is to either validate so you can continue down the path you are assuming is correct (with added conviction), make changes with new learnings (pivot idea, product, and or approach), or realize that what you assumed is not worth y...
Are you the same person you were a year ago? Ten years ago? Of course not. We’re all destined to evolve due to a variety of factors, whether through sudden, life-changing experiences or a slowly morphing sense of self.
Why, then, are we as businesspeople shocked when team members no longer seem to be ideal for their roles? Shouldn’t we anticipate and plan for this reality? And if we did, wouldn’t it be so much easier to move our talented co-workers into positions that make more sense according to who they are, not who they were?
Entrepreneurs everywhere would be wise to think like a Vegas dealer and consider shuffling the deck once in a while to realign everyone’s priorities.
When businesses start out, tea...
Investors want to believe that we're on the same side of the table and are interests are aligned — but it's all bullshit.
The pitch from investors goes something like this "We want all of our incentives to be aligned, so that a big win for us is also a big win for you. We're on the same side of the table!"
That sounds wonderful, but what's missing from that pitch is the fact that only a tiny number of outcomes wind up with both of us having the same upside. Like when you hear about a company getting acquired for a giant sum or going IPO — that's what investors are referring to.
But statistically, that's not how it actually goes. Less than 1% of funded startups are going to have that kind of outcome, which means we should be way more concer...
Our minds approach solving big problems — or big business goals — differently. Some people are analytical; some people are logical; some people are creative; others are visual.
Visual mapping is a straightforward strategy that takes your largest business goal and breaks it down into chunks that you can easily act on.
If you’re the type of person who needs to see how everything connects, and the thought of putting everything into a spreadsheet makes you feel like sleeping — Well, you’re in luck, you visual learner, you. This business template is perfect for the way you think.
Alright, grab a pen and paper (or download our handy template here)
Go ahead and write your “ultimate business goal” right in the center. Then, write d...
A study by the Relational Capital Group revealed that 87 percent of consumers say they’ll stick with a brand after a recall if the company handles it well. People understand that mistakes happen, but they also prefer brands that demonstrate honesty and responsibility when dealing with those mistakes.
Of course, the scope of the fallout of a product recall depends on the nature of the error itself. A single faulty part requires significantly less damage control than a software bug that affects every user. In some cases, a product recall can even mean losing millions of dollars.
However, if a problem isn’t a critical function of your business, you can easily turn it into an opportunity. Even when dealing with a more widespread issue, acceptin...