I generally am working as an acting CTO for about 3-4 start-ups or other companies at any one time. Most often I'm being brought in the early stage, Start-up or Expansion (as the company looks at new product lines). My focus in this post is on the Early and Start-up stages - expansion is more of a consulting, focused project role and it acts different. I was just talking with someone who asked me to define how that could work and what they meant. Great question.

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 be. 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. I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies.

One of the topics that came up in my post Mobile Internet Apple Facebook was around open vs. This issue comes up at the start of almost every new startup company in a variety of forms. From there, you will generally see a pop-up dialog similar to the following (this one is from CitySearch): Once you click Connect, the original site now knows that I’m Tony Karrer from Facebook and the various demographic and friend information from Facebook. closed platforms. I’m constantly struggling with trying to figure out the best way to pull together solutions,

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.

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

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. Also be mindful of the valuable output these reports produce, which may prevent wasted development / false starts. 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

In March 2007,  when Pownce launched, Twitter didn't have much of a head start. think, if I were to do a new start up or a different company, I would pick it in an area where there wasn’t such good competition, determined competition. think there is definitely different levels of start ups and Twitter was definitely (laughs) a good start up, and it's really hard to compete or be compared to. We talked about more than Pownce and Twitter in this interview. Leah Culver is a developer who launched many projects.

and key metrics such as customer acquisition and average revenue per user. In a startup, one of my favorite sayings is “you can do anything, but you can’t do everything.” 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

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.

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. 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