I’m thrilled to announce that we created mini-books (about 80 pages long and only $9-10 on Amazon) out of five of the major functional areas covered in Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams, part of our series along with Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business and Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors. I’ve always said that while I love all three books, in some ways Startup CXO is the best because it’s a “book of books.” While I’d still encourage all CEOs and senior executives (CXOs) to read the full manuscript, my friends and co-authors and I are happy to…
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Business
Good riddance to non-competes
I love that the FTC just banned non-competes, as everyone expected they would. Normally, I’m in favor of small government and fewer regulations, but this is one where I think the government has a legitimate interest in setting up guardrails to a free market. We started off at Return Path years ago with a standard and fairly benign non-compete because they were standard. But once California banned them and then we started doing business internationally in countries where they were illegal or not customary, we realized it was unfair to treat some employees different than others, so we got rid of them entirely and reverted to the common denominator. We don’t have them at Bolster. Restricting employees in terms of…
Decisions
Happy Leap Day! One of the better books I’ve read in the last 6 months is James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, which provides a great framework around habits. It’s worth a read, whether you’re talking about business habits/routines or personal ones. This isn’t a book review, but quickly while I have you – here’s a summary of his “laws”: HOW TO CREATE A GOOD HABITThe 1st Law: Make It ObviousThe 2nd Law:Make It AttractiveThe 3rd Law: Make It EasyThe 4th Law: Make It Satisfying HOW TO BREAK A BAD HABITInversion of the 1st Law: Make It InvisibleInversion of the 2nd Law: Make It UnattractiveInversion of the 3rd Law:…
How I Engage with the CBDO
(Post 4 of 4 in the series on Scaling CBDO’s- other posts are, When to hire your first Chief Business Development Officer, What does Great look like in a Chief Business Development Officer and Signs your Chief Business Development Officer isn’t Scaling) Other than the weekly executive meeting, your day as a CEO rarely has an entry of “meet the CBDO.” Because of the infrequency of deals it’s critical to engage with the CBDO with a regular cadence so that when something does come up you’re not getting to know each other again. Anyway, a few ways I’ve typically spent the most time or gotten the most value out of CBDOs over the years are: One way to engage with…
Signs your CBDO isn’t scaling
(This is the third post in the series… The first one When to Hire your first CBDO is here, and What does Great Look Like in a CBDO is here). The metrics for understanding whether or not your CBDO is scaling differs from other functions like Sales, People Ops, Customer Service, and Finance because throughout the scaling process the CBDO team is likely to be small. So how do you know if your CBDO is scaling if they’re essentially the same size regardless of what the rest of your company is doing? I have found that CBDOs who aren’t scaling well past the startup stage are the ones who typically operate in the following ways. First, a CBDO who isn’t scaling is…
When it’s Time to Hire Your First Chief Business Development Officer
(Post 1 of 4 in the series of Scaling CPDO’s). For most startups the idea of hiring a CBDO is a pipedream, it’s a role that only global corporations have, right? After all, strategic partnerships and M&A are rare events for a startup and can be handled by the founder/CEO, or potentially by someone in Sales. If a startup is partner or channel heavy, those areas may be the focus of the Sales team in general. Or, if there is sporadic M&A activity that can be handled by external advisors or bankers. So how do you know when it’s time to hire your first CBDO? You know it’s time to hire a CBDO when you are spending too much of…
Camera On, Mic On
At my last company, we used to occasionally attend a giant meeting at one of the large ISPs — Microsoft, Yahoo, and the like — and it always annoyed me to be presenting to or engaging in a discussion with a room full of a dozen people and having all of them there with their laptops open, clearly distracted and doing other work. I’m increasingly finding annoyance with the Zoom equivalent, which is being in a meeting or attending a presentation, but turning off your mic and camera. It’s impossible to know as the person leading the meeting or speaking if you’re actually there. And if you’re there, if you’re paying attention. And how many times in a meeting can…
You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen One
Like all CEOs and VCs, I’m a big believer in the power of pattern matching. I just wrote a whole blog post about the limits of pattern matching after hearing the quote above at a board meeting recently. But then a little alarm rang in the back of my head, and realized that I wrote about the value and limitations of pattern matching here years ago with an even better quote from my father-in-law: When you hear hoof beats, it’s probably horses. But you never know when it might be a zebra. So rather that rewrite that entire post, I thought I’d just add onto it a bit here with a current example in my head about executive recruiting and…
Why we use inferior software products
We all interact with dozens of software products every day. Even people who aren’t in tech or don’t have a job that has them staring at a screen all day are constantly using software. I’ve noticed over time that people, myself included, end up using some god-awful pieces of software with terrible design and user experiences and in many cases lesser functionality than competitors. How can this be? Isn’t software cheap and ubiquitous at this point? What’s the excuse for poor UX? Here are four themes I’ve noticed that cause people to use inferior software products. I am sure there are more. The moral of the story isn’t to use inferior software products. And it’s not to build inferior software…
Everything vs. Anything
I heard two great lines recently applied to CEOs that are thought provoking when you look at them together: You have to care about everything more than anything and You can do anything you want but not everything you want Being a CEO means you are accountable for everything that happens in your organization. That’s why you have to care about everything. People. Product. Customers. Cash flow. Hiring. Firing. Board. Fundraising. Marketing. Sales. Etc. You can never afford not to care about something in your business, and even if there’s a particular item you’re more focused on at a given point in time, you can never get to a place where you care about any one particular thing more than…
Should CEOs Wade Into Politics, Part II
I’m fascinated with this topic and how it’s evolving in society. In Part I, a couple years ago now, I changed my long-held point of view from “CEOs should only wade into politics when there’s a direct impact on their business” (things like taxes and specific regulations, legal immigration) — to believing that CEOs can/should wade into politics when there’s an indirect impact on business. In that post, I defined my new line/scope as being one that includes the health and functioning of our democracy, which you can tie to business interests in so many ways, not the least of which this week is the Fitch downgrade of the US credit rating over governance concerns. Other CEOs will have other…