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53 Articles match "Company","CTO","Startup"
The Latest from the Southern California Tech Central Community
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010
This question came up last week. I am hearing from my project management team a bit of distrust in the technical capacity of our web development team. Still there are some common signals / symptoms that I hear about from Founders/CxOs in companies that are the reason they are calling me. The system keeps crashing – no problem. Annoyed at testers for finding bugs. No attention to detail. Same I think we suffer because of the distance and culture but the project management team takes every late delivery or small bug as evidence that the development team may not be capable. My quick response was that this was likely some combination of: Weak development team Poor communication, especially around requirements and expectation setting Past failures (missed deadlines, bugs, downtime, etc.)
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Robin's latest startup is Internships.com (www.internships.com), an online site focused on aggregating internship opportunities and providing resources to potential interns. We spoke to Robin about the new startup, his executive team, as well as his angel investing activity here.
How How did you decide to start Internships.com?
Robin One of the more successful serial entrepreneurs here in Southern California has been Robin D. Richards , who most recently sold The NTI Group to Blackboard, and previously also was CEO of Vivendi Universal Net USA, the founding president
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Tuesday, March 9, 2010
In my post, Technology Roles in Startups , I described some of the different ways I engage with startup companies such as CTO Founder , CTO , Part-Time CTO , Acting CTO , Consultant, Advisor and Advisory Board Member. I thought it was worth capturing a bit more about Advisory Roles, Advisory Boards and particularly Technology-Oriented Advisors – who are often thought of a bit different when it comes to those roles. Actually, if you look back, advisory boards came from being Technical Advisory Boards where the advisors were primarily professors,
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The Best from the Southern California Tech Central Community
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Saturday, December 1, 2007
I generally am working as an acting CTO for about 3-4 start-ups or other companies at any one time. I also found this interesting graphic of the changing needs around the CTO role in different size/type companies that somewhat echoes my experience. ( Roger Smith ) This helps explain where I normally play. Most often I'm being brought in the early stage, Start-up or Expansion (as the company looks at new product lines). I was just talking with someone who asked me to define how that could work and what they meant. Great question.
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies. In December 2007, I described how I commonly take on an Acting CTO Role in a Start-up . I used an image from Roger Smith that describes the varying roles of a CTO as the company matures. However, I’ve now begun questioning how and what an early-stage Most often at the earliest point in the life of a startup, the dominant need is certainly to produce product to get something in the market, get funding, etc.
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Tuesday, January 5, 2010
started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute of an entrepreneur : Tenacity . I They often make great team members such as head of products, CTO, head of sales, CFO, etc. Great companies are comprised of great individual point people or functional leaders.
This is part of my series on what makes an entrepreneur successful . I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs.
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Tuesday, January 12, 2010
I scan it for the most important messages to be sure nothing urgent has popped up.
Colin Kelley, the CTO of RingRevenue , left a comment in my last post about the need to “ mask interrupts ” in order to get work done. It 8221; They taught us to write down questions when they came up and batch them together in point sheets. I recently wrote a post about avoiding the “ Deferred Life Plan ” and some related thoughts about personal productivity that came from Tim Ferriss’s book, The Four Hour Workweek.
I
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Saturday, February 27, 2010
I grew up believing that human behavior was 20% nature, 80% nurture. Now of all data is made up . OK, OK, not literally made up. I’m If you take 2,000 of the world’s top performing companies, only 29 (1.5%) are run by women . They Nature vs. Nurture. You’ve You’ve
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Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Mark is a CTO, see, and his company, PortBlue , was recently acquired (congrats, Mark!). will start with the highest level and work my down to the nitty-gritty of the tech trade.
LA CTO Forum – This is a private community of CTOs in the southern California area. My friend Mark Long recently asked me about networking in Los Angeles. After transitioning to the new team, Mark was left to wonder, what now?
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Monday, October 19, 2009
On December 2nd, 2006 I wrote the blog post published later in this post when I was CEO of startup Koral about my experiences in pitching VCs. After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop blogging and they took over my blog as an asset in the sale of the company. Another called Parker Harris, the co-founder and CTO. My blog was wiped out. I am very grateful to my friend Zoli Erdos for finding this retro posting for me at web.archive.org.
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute of an entrepreneur : Tenacity . I I’ll start with an obvious one – I talk with the entrepreneur about competitors. The sales team doesn’t like me to give demos,” I usually think to myself, “a follow up meeting probably isn’t necessary.” This is part of my series on what makes an entrepreneur successful . I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs.
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Thursday, February 25, 2010
I just got done reading a post by Roger Ehrenberg Advice for CTO Founders: Don't Let Business Kill the Business where he suggests that CTO Founders should not move too early in finding a business cofounder: Too often, however, I have found CTO / Founders paired with business people who not only don't add value, but frequently detract from the value of the business. This is not only sad but incredibly frustrating, because it is so easy to see how a great technology can be developed and commercialized if only - if only the CTO hadn't been impulsive and insecure and
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Thursday, November 12, 2009
My advice with Elephants was that you need to take them head on in your first VC meeting because the VC is already thinking about the issue whether you bring it up or not.
large company has told you that you need to change your brand name or they’ll sue you for trademark infringement (this is a real world, recent example)
company has just filed suit against you for product patent infringement This is part of my series with Advice on Raising Venture Capital .
I recently wrote a post on how to Deal with your Elephants in the Room during your VC meetings.
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