Technical Strategy I support the technical team to: review short and long-term technology strategies to help direct strategic technical decisions and help to ensure appropriate technology usage, help define needed technical research activities, assess new and emerging technologies to determine application to business needs, help determine resource needs within business constraints, review and influence business and technical processes to help balance competing needs and priorities. Business Strategy I support the leadership team to: provide input on short and long-term business

Who’s responsible for what portions? How will we find and interview developers? How do we motivate and manage developers? What do we need to do to make sure we can survive technical due diligence by investors and partners? What specific technical innovations might make sense? What can we build that might be protectable? What metrics are going to be the key startup metrics and how do we get those metrics without too much cost? Where and how will we host the systems? It’s not comfortable on either side of the table. More on the

Take a look at Startup Metrics . 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 inviting friends is going to work well? Depending on

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.

With our portfolio companies, and startups in general, metrics are key to measuring your business performance and help to guide the company. Be mindful of the engineering resources and opportunity cost of developing analytics tools and reports. Andrew Chen over at Futuristic play , wrote a great post on the importance of analytics, but also the balancing act of deciding what to track and how much time to spend on it. Andrew reminded me of the following key points:

So, you can easily get sold that there’s little to no Gap. Some of the activities that are likely part of the mix where there might be need: Review and provide input on business plans Costs and time estimation Product prioritization Options analysis Systems analysis and design Technical risk analysis Technical research and evaluation Systems for accounting and reporting Metrics (see startup metrics ) Security Integration Scalability Social media integration plans (ex. see When to Use Facebook Connect

and key metrics such as customer acquisition and average revenue per user. 8221; With limited time and resources, entrepreneurs must cut through the clutter and focus their time and attention on the most critical issues. In meeting with entrepreneurs, especially those that I haven’t met or heard about before, I often ask them to give me the 5 min overview of the business before we dive into any details or the formal presentation deck. I

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. There are TONS of great resources out there for people who really want to get into Google Analytics. Repost of SMCLA's Going Goo Goo Over Google Analytics Below is a highlight video of the evening.  To

I'm still trying to understand what this is going to mean in practice. I'm working quite a bit with startups who are leveraging social media, but I'm finding it hard to predict success and metrics. And how can an early stage company think about social media relative to important startup metrics (see [link] )? I am a product guy so my bias is always to focus on building a great product first. 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. This time I'm

That's his thing, and he was able to use the resources that he had to empower himself to publish a novel, which is cool. Leah: Ya know that would be a good metric to measure. We talked about more than Pownce and Twitter in this interview. Leah Culver is a developer who launched many projects. Pownce was just the highest profile