Better Zoom Meetings
My partners and I hold weekly Monday meetings and about once a quarter, we do an extended, six or seven-hour version. Before COVID-19, we’d end the day with a dinner and a chance to socialize and decompress after a long day of portfolio updates and strategic planning. And, of course, before COVID we’d all be in person. Our discussions were lively, they were engaged and we’d often make use of whiteboards, sticky notes and other forms of interaction (we have a post card with a logo for each of our portfolio companies which we often make creative use of). They’re fun and super productive. …
July 30, 2020· 4 min read
Organizational Scaling
For the early part of your business you’re likely too busy to be spending a lot of time thinking about management structures, team optimization and how your business scales. You’re just getting shit done. And, even for experienced executives, making quite a few things up as you go along. The solution to many early scale challenges is to find something that works and then do more of it. That works great, right up to the point where it stops working completely. We’ve had a lot of companies go through scale challenges (I’d say typically around 100 people, but plenty of companies have muscled through that point and built 200 or even 300 person organizations without paying much attention to the scale structured needed to make that kind of organizational scale actually work. Here are a few things to think about/look out for based on our experience messing this up over and over again. …
October 22, 2019· 4 min read
Is your sales problem really a product problem?
Not suprisingly when companies are having issues in sales they look to their sales or and sales leadership for the source of the problem. In the cliche example (but one which happens all the time) sales will loop in marketing (“we’re not getting enough leads”, “the leads aren’t high quality enough”). But typically product is left out of this mix. To be clear, there are plenty of sales related issues that are directly attributable to poor sales processes, bad training of sales resources, poor time management, etc. But often overlooked is the role product plays in sales challenges. I’m not writing this to offer a ready made excuse for sales teams that aren’t executing but as a reminder to executive teams that when you’re struggling to understand sales challenges be sure to look at closely at product. I’d suggest looking both at how existing customers are actually using your product (often not well understood by companies) and comparing that with both the type of customer you’re targeting (which may be very different than your current mix of customers) and what features they require. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve looked more closely into this question and found that the problem we’re actually solving isn’t well mapped to a shifting target in sales. Or where there are specific product features that we’re lacking that are preventing product adoption but for whatever reason that feedback insn’t coming through as part of our sales process. …
October 18, 2017· 2 min read
It’s time to get away
As we approach August, and having recently taken some time off myself (some real time off this time – more on that experience in a different post) I thought it might be a good time to talk about the importance of vacation. No – this isn’t going to be a post that waxes poetic about the importance of recharging and how the startup culture is totally fucked up in its crazy work ethic. All true, but I’d actually like to approach the question here from a purely business perspective. …
July 31, 2014· 2 min read
Act Like A Leader
Act like the leader. Simple advice but I see companies not do this all the time. You’re the leader in this space – act like it. Don’t be ashamed, bashful or defensive about it. This doesn’t mean beat the “we’re the biggest player in town” drumbeat all the time. It means leverage that fact and all that goes along with it to do things that the industry leader does – highlight customers, talk use cases, get more press, hold a user conference. …
January 23, 2014· 2 min read
John Mack on the inside of the financial crisis
A friend recently sent me a link to a talk John Mack gave at Wharton that I think is absolutely fascinating. I’ve read a number of books and articles about the key events surrounding the financial crisis but I find these sorts of first person accounts so much more interesting. And I think Mack is an extremely engaging person. I started my career at Morgan Stanley as an analyst in 1994 and actually had a great personal encounter with Mack that was probably my most memorable moment working in the banking industry. I was just starting my 2nd year at MS and was holed up in an empty office editing a draft of an offering document. Having undoubtably slept only a few hours the night before, I’m sure I was hardly the picture of professionalism with my slightly long hair, undone tie and stocking feet up on a chair, when in walks the head of my group, the head of the Investment Banking Division and John Mack. Mack says to me: “Do you mind if we use this conference room for a few minutes?” Startled, I respond something to the effect of: “Of course. I was just using this for a quiet place to review this document,” and started to gather my things. Walking out of the office, Mack calls to me and says: “I know a quiet place for you to read up on the 42nd floor.” (that’s the executive floor). I sort of chuckle but quickly realize that he’s serious. He introduces himself and picks up the conference phone: “Barbara [I’m making that up – I can’t remember his assistant’s name], Seth Levine is on his way up – can you please make him comfortable in my office.” Five minutes later I’m sitting in John Mack’s office. Alone. Reading (or trying to read, at least) and mark up a prospectus. And for context, at the time my apartment in NY was maybe 300 sq ft. Mack’s office was probably 8 times that size. I was sitting at a small round conference table, but the room also contained a sofa and chairs seating area, at least two desks and plenty of other things I was likely too nervous to notice. About 30 minutes later Mack comes back and proceeds to sit down and talk with me for probably 20 minutes. What did I study in school? how did I come to work at Morgan Stanley? how has my experience been? etc. The man is as engaging as he appears on this video. I can see why so many people are incredibly loyal to him.
July 6, 2011· 3 min read
HR as a core competency
In the world of start-ups, HR is at the bottom of the bottom of the heap of priorities most companies are working on. The vast majority of companies think about HR as a process and compliance function, outsource it to 3rd party providers (payroll, benefits, etc.) and doing their best to forget about it. If there’s any focus on HR as a function it is around recruiting (also typically outsourced and generally treated as very episodic). Sure – there’s plenty of talk about “culture” – of success, of working hard, of some other superlative that’s not particularly interesting or differentiating (“we want to hire great people and expect them to be hard working and successful!” duh) – but little real work done to actually execute against that and almost never someone made responsible for achieving success in people management. …
November 18, 2010· 3 min read
hiring as a core competency
Most startups spend plenty of time working on things like their product plans, requirements docs, market studies and the like. They are important aspects of running their companies and the kind of things that improve with collaboration and varied input from as well as from the iterative and inclusive process they typically require. You’d expect to find documents related to these sorts of activities on an intranet or company wiki and you’d expect that they’d be included in the occasional board package and discussed with advisors. …
January 29, 2009· 4 min read
Management
It’s a VC cliche that great management trumps a great idea. In this case there’s a lot of truth to the cliche. Over the course of my venture career I’ve been exposed to all combinations of teams and ideas and am constantly reminded of not only the power of great teams, but also of the pitfalls of poor ones. We’ve thought about this a lot at Foundry and have pushed each other hard on investing only in people we’re ecstatic about as entrepreneurs (and resisting the temptation to “fix” management teams that are not A+ or fool ourselves into believing that an outstanding idea is more important than the people who implement it). This last point is often missed on our industry – I think there’s an incorrect belief that a mediocre team can push their way through a great idea. While certainly there are cases where a company manages to a great outcome with a sub-par team, my own experience has been unequivocal. While I’ve had a handful of cases where – with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight – the idea we were pursuing was only fair but where a fantastic management team has managed to guide a company to a good outcome, I’ve had almost no cases where we’ve placed a company in the hands of sub-par managers and reached a happy ending (as I mention above there are some edge cases where mediocre teams manage to a happy place, but to me these are just lucky exceptions). …
November 11, 2008· 2 min read