We are digging into the Denver Founder Institute archives to get some great quotes from some of Denver's top entrepreneurs, so I thought I'd share some of them here!
A CEO's Job Description
Jim Franklin, startup board member and advisor, explains his take on the job description of a startup CEO:
"As a CEO you are responsible for vision, values, and culture. Hiring people, doing interviews with the first 100 employees, making sure you can articulate the company vision to external and internal audiences. You create healthy and effective teams, especially a management team. As a team owner ask yourself, 'how do I define the team? How do I fix the team? When a CEO feels like doing something, whether that be in sales or finance, they should pull back and think, 'how can I fix the team so that the team can fix the certain problems in these areas'. Your company shouldn’t be dependent on you jumping into the fray and solving each and every problem that arrives."
Startup Research
Michael Clark, AllergyPal Co-Founder and Photobucket CTO, explains the importance of doing in depth research before proceeding with your business idea.
"No matter what happens in what you’re researching, what really matters the most is that you are building a product worth building. That it’s worth it to you, it’s worth it to your family, it’s worth it to the consumers that you’re building it for. Because there is nothing more exhausting than at end of the day realizing that you put every inch of your energy into something that nobody cares about...including yourself. Make sure, what you're doing, you really can get passionate about, and get behind. Here are three reasons why research matters:
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This is going to be your life. You will sleep, eat, and breathe your startup.
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You are going to expect people to put money, time, and their energy as well, and before you can expect that from anyone else, you have to make sure that you can answers these questions: What am I really doing and how am I going to get there?
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Is your company going to be sustainable? Something that is going to be around for years from now, or be meaningful in some other way."
Funding and Product Development
Mike Stemple, Founder at Bonsai Networks, has built 14 companies. Here he shares the number one key to success, and three important aspects to focus on while developing your product.
“One of my claims to fame is that I never got venture capital before, I’ve been angel funded or self funded. Skin-it is now worth 100M, and I started with 50K in my pocket."
"There are three aspects that I focus on: Attitude, Ideas, and actions to put them into play. If you do those three well you create an opportunity. And when you have an opportunity that’s what you breathe life into; building a team, building technology, and growing it into hopefully a business.”
Naming and Branding
"My company has gone through four name changes in five years. Whether you’re a person, or a company, or an organization, the first impression is key. People without knowing who you are, what you do, they’re going have a first impression, so think really hard about this."
"Develop a brand strategy before you pick a name. It’s really important to develop your strategy before you decide to rename… Try to do an office exercise, or this exercise below:
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Brand Business Signature - This states the game you’re in, describes basically what your business does. It’s your business signature. Ours was: ‘Travel Loyalty Rewards Experts’.
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Brand proposition - This is the agenda, this is what you’re going to do. This sets out your prime features, this is what you’re going to build. This is what sets you apart from everyone else. Ours was: ‘The One-Stop Travel Shop’.
- Brand Promise - This is your one line, your brand promise, possibly make this your slogan. Ours was: ‘Using milestones to make the most of your hard earned rewards’. Simple and to the point."
Cofounders, Hiring and Firing
Bradley Brown, InteliVideo CEO, President and Founder, lays out his process for choosing a co-founder and hiring a team.
Cofounder: "My largest company was my consulting company, we had 400 people working for us when we sold the business, so I hired a lot of people. I had two partners in that business, we worked at Oracle together and we worked on a few different products for a year before we decided to break away… I (co-founder) dated both for awhile (5 to 6 years) trying to figure out the business we were planning to build. Ideally the person you would have as a co-founder is someone that you know, or somebody that knows them very well, so that they can give you a good background on them."
Team: "The whole company was hired based off of traits that we came up with. We spent an entire year laying out the traits that we wanted every employee that we hired to have. Every meeting that we had, every chance we got, we talked about how someone had tact, moral courage, respect, and we talked about this on a regular basis with the employees so that they understood what we were trying to achieve. And when we interviewed people it was all about these traits, listening to them, really trying to see if they would fit in culturally. The cultural aspect is key."
How to Spend
Adam Swiecki, President of Swiecki Enterprises, Inc., emphasizes the importance in tracking every dollar you spend.
“There is a certain degree of discipline in your operational expenses. An interesting question is, ‘How do you spend your profit?’ Because ultimately you’re only going to have profit. Your business generates a dollar worth of profit, what do you do with that dollar? For me I spend it on inventory, because a dollar I spend on inventory, can turn into two dollars I can make in sales….If I can’t justify it I won’t spend it. I also spend on people, I do an ROI calculation on people. If they’re not creating an environment to make more money, I simply just won’t hire them."
Startup Legal and IP
Scott Yates, CEO of BlogMutt, describes how a patent can be a useful part of negotiation when eventually selling to another company.
“Patents have a value in the marketplace. My patent was for my first company MyTrafficnews. When I was in negotiations to sell my patent to traffic.com, they said, ‘well we looked at your patent, we think that it’s not that defensible. We don’t think that theres that much to it.’ Turns out, that was all a negotiation, and sure enough the day after we closed the deal, they pasted it onto their homepage, even though they told me it was not all that valuable. Down a long line of closures, Microsoft obtained my patent, bumping their costs up."
"If someone tells you that your patent isn’t that valuable, it could all be negotiation. Patents can be important for negotiations, not necessarily for the enforcement of the patent itself, but nonetheless I did get a good patent. I also had a great patent attorney who knew how to phrase it so it would get through the US patent and trademark office. A patent is like another language. It’s worse than learning another language really because it’s such a small group of people who know this language. You need somebody that understand that language completely.’"
Need your questions answered?
Many of these mentors will be speaking a our free startup event in Denver on Tuesday, October 14 - we hope you can join! Or, apply to the Founder Institute today.
