Ben Horowitz has a great post on his blog titled: How Andreesen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs. One of the key elements of their evaluation is decision-making. Here’s just a quick snippet from Ben’s post: Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed […]
Startup Founders Can’t Live in Silos
The “classic” founding team for a startup is one business guy and one tech guy. Sounds logical but the model is flawed and risky. The risk is this: If either founder feels like they can live in their own silo (either business or tech), the startup will flounder and the likelihood of failure increases significantly. […]
Startup CEOs: Masters of Alignment
If there’s one thing startup CEOs have to excel at it’s managing the alignment of interests across a ton of different people. It’s a lot more complicated than you might think. Alignment means everyone is pushing for the same goals and executing on their part in order to see the shared goals realized. It’s impossible […]
Startup CEOs: Delegate Responsibility Don’t Outsource It
So here begins a possible series of posts for startup CEOs and founders, based on my experience with Standout Jobs (and before that). I have a few ideas to work on, we’ll see what comes of them. Here’s the first… The role of startup CEO is to delegate responsibility, not outsource it. I’ve mentioned before […]
4 Ways to Align Interests Between Startup Founders and Investors
Are investors and startup founders on the same side of the table, or the opposite side? A: Depends. When things are going well, everyone feels like they’re on the same side of the table. When things are going not so well, it’s a different story. This is the reality of the startup-investor relationship. It’s not […]
Startup CEOs Need To Do Sales
Doing sales isn’t typically one of the favorite things of most startup CEOs (and by extension, startup founding teams). Certainly they want sales (because sales = $$), but they don’t want to actually do the sales. This is a huge problem for startups. Startup CEOs need to be very close to their prospects and customers […]
Startup CEOs Make Millions of Decisions
The job of startup CEO is all about making decisions. Lots and lots of decisions. We tend to focus on and remember big decisions — over-emphasizing their importance in the grand scheme of things. But the trick to being a successful startup CEO is mastering the art of micro-decision making. Micro-decisions are small decisions — […]
CEO Paralysis: the Microscope and the Telescope
Check out this tweet from @exectweets (I believe originally from Tom Stewart): CEO paralysis caused by trying to look simultaneously through a microscope at every cost & a telescope at the future It was too long to re-tweet effectively without having to edit it, so I decided to write a blog post instead. To say […]
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