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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 / startup CTO 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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Thursday, March 11, 2010
Give me granularity. If you’re a Web-based startup, for example, show me how many unique visitors you think you can get in the beginning, and what you’re using for an estimated conversion rate (buyers to browsers). And it’s surprising how few startup founders think in those terms. And it becomes really important to have that granularity really fast. I’ve talked before about initial conversations with founders and the questions I’m likely going to ask Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Before You Develop Anything . Tim Berry has a great post on Why I Hate Those Huge Market Numbers tells us that he doesn’t like to see business plans with multi-billion market numbers used as the basis for projections.
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Monday, February 15, 2010
Last Friday, the LA CTO Forum hosted a discussion on the various metrics used to measure ourselves and our companies. found a bunch of old examples, sanitized them, and was struck by how much metrics evolve over the lifecycle of a company. was inspired enough to put together a diagram that describes how the metrics for a product or startup company evolve over time. I was asked to participate, and eagerly dug into my archives.
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Thursday, March 4, 2010
I’ve worked with 30+ early-stage companies in all sorts of capacities (and spoken to many, many more), so I thought it might be worthwhile trying to classify the various ways that I’ve engaged in different technology roles in startups. Background This post partly really came about as a result of a great conversation yesterday with David Croslin a former CTO at HP who recently conducted an interesting experiment. He posted on several social networking sites the following message: If you know of a startup company that could benefit from the knowledge, experience, professional
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Monday, March 1, 2010
Here are some recent great posts that I’ve come across that generally fall in the intersection of startups and CTOs. Enjoy. Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs , February 2, 2010 Looks at the critical equation around customer acquisition cost vs. customer lifetime value similar to what I discussed in Startup Metrics but in more depth. Great stuff. Of course, one of the best ideas around this is to have Negative Customer Acquisition Costs .
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Wednesday, April 1, 2009
For example, if you click on Startup , you find: => The most recent posts, announcements and web pages on the top of the page that relate to Startups. => The best (according to social signals across the network) content below that such as: Acting CTO Role in a Start-up The DNA of an A++ Team Startup Delta Force… => The keywords on the left are ordered according to their relationship to the current term. So you can see that Entrepreneur (60) LinkedIn (15) Metrics (16) SEO (15) Company (141) are all considered highly
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Thursday, October 22, 2009
Great by Cliff Allen Business Networking Online who I had blogged about previously in Marketing, Startups and Networking in Los Angeles . It's like a dinner discussion where a topic is discussed, then the group moves to the next topic. Yes, blogs has been touted as a place to have conversations, but Tony is doing Visible Networking by starting the conversation in a blog post, then continuing the conversation in the comments. In this post, Cliff provides some feedback on what works when you move towards doing business networking online. I'm trying to get the concept of
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
That's where I learned I enjoyed interacting with customers and working with development teams to build and launch products. From there, I became the first non-founder employee at an e-commerce startup called BITSource, which was the first electronic software distributor delivering electronic volume software licenses to corporations. I know you are still in stealth, but what can you tell us. Earlier this year I founded a new startup called KlickFu . Visible networking is turning into a really great opportunity to get to know people better, get to meet new people, and have some interesting conversations.
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Monday, March 1, 2010
Our new volunteer board pulled off a great panel full of juicy tidbits of knowledge from start to finish.
With goals in place, your metrics have so much more meaning and the time you spend analyzing data will drive more informed decisions geared at improving your conversion rates.
Google has a “Conversion University” with a TON of great training materials to get you up and running. Repost of SMCLA's Going Goo Goo Over Google Analytics
Below is a highlight video of the evening. To
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