This is part of my ongoing series “ Start-up Lessons. ” This is a very important post to me because I find myself giving this advice all the time and if you don’t follow the basic advice here you can cause yourself much heartache down the line – even if your company ultimately becomes über successful. Sometimes they’re working full time at a company or sometimes they’ve already left their employer and they’re bouncing around ideas with friends.  These 8221;  If you want to subscribe to my RSS feed please click here or to get my blog by email click here .

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.

This is part of my ongoing series Startup Lessons Building Building companies is hard work.  I I started my first company in 1999 in London at the height of the dot com craze.  We We also had facilities in Dublin, Ireland where our company was initially founded. We We went through the euphoria of massive exposure at the time of our [...] ...Tags:

This is part of my ongoing series Startup Lessons Building companies is hard work.  I I started my first company in 1999 in London at the height of the dot com craze.  We We also had facilities in Dublin, Ireland where our company was initially founded. We went through the euphoria of massive exposure at the time of our launch due to an article that ran in the Financial Times.  We We were unprepared.  Our

This post is part of my series “ Startup Lessons ” Elephants, Deer and Rabbits – Some thoughts on start-up segmentation Nearly all of the mistakes I made at my first company I fixed by the time of my second company.  This This is the only mistake I repeated twice and it is a mistake that I see many, many I know that this advice won’t apply to every possible startup – but I think it applies to many.

This is part of my ongoing posts on  Startup Advice .  There are people who tell startups that they should hire the most senior people that they can find.  It is tempting because you not only see that they were VP Sales at 3 other startups but also that they have great access (according to their resume) to senior executives at companies you’re trying to target.  Only Hire A+ People Who Punch Above Their Weight Class I’m not one of those. 

If you’re a startup and you don’t have a close relationship with a few law firms you’re really missing one of the most important relationships that any entrepreneur can have. When to get a lawyer - If you plan to be a venture or angel backed technology company (what I mostly write about) the best time to start meeting and getting to know lawyers is long before you ever start your company.  I recently read a post over on VentureHacks titled, “ Top Ten Reasons Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers ” written by Scott Walker (who blogs on legal issues for entrepreneurs ). 

This was evident at the Twiistup pre-event company pitch last week at UCLA.  Francisco Francisco Dao came up with the idea of letting 10 companies that weren’t selected for Twiistup to do a presentation the night before to a group of people and let the audience pick one company to win the final slot at Twiistup.  I I’m not saying the companies were bad – many were not.  But Most people suck at presenting to big groups.  It’s It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime

This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice .  Many startup companies hire advisory boards.  prominent industry luminaries to be closely associated with the company.  It’s done partly in hopes of gaining their wisdom but it’s also done to portray the company in a positive light through association. It’s very tempting.  It’s mostly done by first-time entrepreneurs who want to persuade (bribe?)

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 / startup CTO should 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.