As technology
entrepreneurs, we’ve jointly launched more than 13 start-ups. Most of these ventures have been pretty
successful, like Vertica Systems, which we co-founded in 2005 and sold to HP in
2011. Others were less successful. But
we love launching start-ups and so we soldier on, both in founding new
start-ups and investing in other entrepreneurs’ start-ups.
In our many encounters with
entrepreneurs and company founders, we get a lot of questions about how to
start a company. Everything from
sweeping questions like “What one thing made Vertica a success?” to the basics
like “What makes a Series A different from a Series B?”
In this blog, we’ll put our
heads together to identify the questions we hear most frequently and give you
our individual answers to each question, presented in pairs. Since we work together as well as
independently on starting companies, this exercise should be interesting. We may disagree on some things, but we
guarantee you’ll get candid, practical and road-tested advice that you can put
to work in your ventures.
Here are the top 10
questions we will be answering in the coming weeks and months:
How do I turn my great idea
into a business?
What are the “musts” I need
for securing financing?
How can I avoid “rock
fetches” and other wastes of my time?
How do I determine the best
stock distribution plan for my business?
How should I get the best
terms?
What’s the difference
between seed, Series A and Series B?
When do I need to change
the CEO?
How do I avoid spend and
feature creep?
How do I manage my VCs?
How do I protect my
intellectual property?
We may answer other questions or address
other newsworthy topics along the way, but promise that we will get to all 10
questions.
We hope that you’ll follow us,
comment, and share your own experiences.
Hey, this is great timing! I'll be following pretty closely as I try to kick off a new start-up venture. I've been in a few start-ups previously, so that's helped a bit, but not as a "founder" at t=0. I'd also like to hear your thoughts on some of the mundane things, like how do I get health insurance for me and my early employees? Are there organizations that can act as aggregators for some of this early infrastructure before our own economies of scale can kick in?
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