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.  Lets start with the definition as presented at Investopedia.com (one 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.

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.

Brea-based IMS Company , a manufacturer of in-flight portable entertainment players and related products, said Friday that it has acquired Flight Deck Resources, a provider of hardware for flight deck management on airplanes. According to IMS, Flight Deck Resources will become a new division, which will be known as IMS Flight Deck. Tags: Financial terms of the buy were not disclosed. The new division will focus on the firm's "Electronic Flight Bag" products, which include touchscreen-based hardware for managing flight checklists, data charts, and related hardware and software.

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 . would never have come up with that idea, if I hadn’t spent years reading about the resourcefulness of other entrepreneurs. If you 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.

I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies. 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 / startup CTO should be. I recently read a post that called this a Consulting CTO and suggested: Founders of In December 2007, I described how I commonly take on an Acting CTO Role in a Start-up . Most often at the earliest point in the life of a startup,

Thursday, February 26, 2009 -- The 3rd SoCalBio Human Resources Conference.Organized annually by the Southern California Biomedical Council (SoCalBio), this HR conference provides a forum for information sharing among HR executives in device and biotech companies, HR service providers, bio-recruiters, educators, and workforce training professionals to address human capital and employment needs of Southern California's life-science industry. See [link] (mor

This issue comes up at the start of almost every new startup company in a variety of forms. But I’ll still capture email and establish a separate password. There’s cost for each of the authentication mechanisms, is it worth it? Do I believe I’ll get more registrants? How well will I get publishing/viral behavior with third party authentication as compared to a Share button? Would the demographic data be valuable? Would friend information be valuable? Is there a particular kind of messaging on the social site that’s needed? Do I strongly believe that

“If You Build It…They Will Come” may work for historical baseball ghosts, but it’s not a strategy you can rely on when starting an internet company. Helpful Resources about Search Engine Traffic : 68 Helpful SEO Tools “ Helpful Resources about for Getting Referral Traffic : Top Blogs List (with email contacts) Social Media - Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Driving traffic to your website is a formula that can be reverse engineered. Other than paying for traffic with advertising, there are only so many ways to

Santa Monica-based Cornerstone OnDemand , a developer of software for talent and human resources management, announced today that it has rolled out a new version of its product targeted at the mid-size business market. Cornerstone OnDemand's software-as-a-service is used by companies to manage things like employee compliance, learning, compensation, and performance. The firm said the new version is focused on meeting the needs of small- and mid-sized businesses with up to 1,500 employees. Pricing on the new software was not disclosed.