The first company he founded failed, but now Darrin Clement is running a multi-million dollar mapping business that he founded and bootstrapped. How did he go from having to close down his previous company to winning so many customers at this one? His first big leap into entrepreneurship was launching Optiwave, a fiber optic consulting company. The simple answer is he learned to sell. This program will show you how he did that and what YOU can learn from his experience.

Bob is a Director and long-time member of the Pasadena Angels, has been investing in early stage companies for 5 years, and has been held numerous “C” level positions at private and publicly traded companies. To set the stage, as an early stage investor, I look to invest in a “perfect storm” company.  So for an example lets assume a $500k investment in a company with Following on the heals of last week’s post from Andrea Belz, we have another guest blogger, Bob Aholt. Bob also teaches graduate level finance courses at Antioch University.   By Bob Aholt

know that, if you absorb the lessons from his experience, you'll avoid making similar mistakes as you build your company. The company underestimated how hard it is to get customers You can never lose sight of, "Okay, what's our company supposed to be in the first place?" Somehow, as Luke Burgis raced to build his business, he ended up selling fitness bars, cereal, pet supplements and "sexual enhancement" products. At the same time, he found himself running an online message board and a YouTube-like video site.

Jeff Fluhr and his friend from school got together and created a company called StubHub which they built up and sold to eBay. If you want a great example of how to think through the size of a market, the opportunity in a market, you're going to hear Jeff talk about that in this program too. But, you know, I think it wasn't until after my first real company StubHub that people, I think, thought of me in that light. In 2000, people had all kinds of assumptions about buying and selling tickets to events. They assumed it was illegal or that they'd get ripped off or that it

As part of doing that, I've had the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of different chief technical officers from different kinds of companies over those years. This is a private group of CTOs who are responsible for software development within their companies. But where do the software development companies in Southern California congregate? Part of the reason is that when I look at the CTOs, I've helped organize the Los Angeles CTO Forum for almost 10 years. They are generally the senior most person responsible for custom software development, database

IROs tend to be the last holdouts within a company’s communication teams to embrace changes in the communications process.  m going to show you two ways IROs can become the company hero based on both of those challenges. IROs have many, significant responsibilities relating to the health and welfare of the company.  During the last year, I’ve spoken to numerous investor relations officers (IROs) on the topic of social media and investor relations.  Holding out is usually blamed on two reasonable excuses:

For example, if you wanted to build an e-commerce site in 1996, it was really hard!  Any efficiencies Just ask the founder of TWPLY (a Twitter app) who built and sold his company in 24 hours! Tags: Managing an Early Stage Company Uncategorized You and Your Company entrepreneurship execution startups technolog Is your business’s success going to be based on execution or technology?  Or Or is it something in between?

RSS ); Why You Should Start a Company in... Los Angeles By: Laura Rich February 26, 2010

I just had an all-too common conversation with the founder of a startup who had spent more than a year working with a software development company who had produced a mess. Please be able to provide me with a few specific examples of different types of customers, what they need, what the system will do for them. Tell me about the business. What are some good examples of similar sites? What The mess really comes from a developer who was willing to get started on a product that was not fully thought out. I always take a very different approach in early conversations.

Paul Graham, founder Y Combinator which funds startups, said entrepreneurs need to be “ relentlessly resourceful ,” which made me think of the story of how I got the money to launch my first company . If you have any examples of relentless resourcefulness, share them so we can inspire others. When I graduated from college I was hell bent on starting a business right away, but I was dirt poor. One day, I looked at the flood of catalogs that J Crew sent me and was bummed out.