Three questions came up after the last bootcamp session. The third is associated with general selling (this applies to both selling your product and selling an investment in your company – which can be considered as a product). As a product manager, it was my job to provide sales training each quarter to the new sales [...]

Three questions came up after the last bootcamp session. The second is: “I’ve been talking to potential investors, but keep getting surprised when I think we have a deal. What am I doing wrong?” Whilst this (and the following post) are way beyond the scope of the bootcamp, it’s worth touching on a couple of [...]

Three questions came up after the last bootcamp session. The first is regarding P&L’s and their role in business plans and operational plans. P&L is a set of financials that are required for both the business plan and the operations plan. However they serve fundamentally different purposes in each plan. In a business plan, the [...]

From a new report by Deloitte.

We briefly scratched the surface of the dozens of potential terms that could be included in a  term sheet, but I wanted to emphasise a few points from our discussions. 1. In most cases the “terms” in a term sheet (or more accurately in the Investor Agreement – which is the legal document) are not [...]

Next week @Start\UP bootcamp, we’re going to be looking at strategies and plans for getting investment. Of course, a significant proportion of that will be what VC’s are looking for in a company and business opportunity, but equally, we will be covering what a company should look for in a VC. In most cases I [...]

There was very lively discussion tonight at @startvi on the, seemingly, blind requirement, for startup software companies to have patents. Rather that repeat the discussion here, let me summarize. Patents do almost nothing for software startups, and do a lot of actual harm via the opportunity cost (in time and money) to gain an illusion [...]

(Title idea stolen for @cimota blog) I was attracted to a post over the weekend from Steve Blank. In particular, this caught my eye … “business plans are a poor planning and execution tool for startups”. I agree 100%. I also agree with much of Steve’s reasoning, but not all. Without being repetitive, I thought [...]

This was a question asked by “Rutherford” earlier this week. This is an interesting subject that needs its own post. The context of the quest was in respect to “they spin a new dynamic around the product concept, it gets traction and suddenly people are ‘getting it’.” Firstly, I don’t think that it’s given that [...]

One of the challenges in only having three hours per session, is that, to cover all of a subject, you need 2 or three sessions. Last week, we looked at Cap Tables and Dilution, and last night we looked at VC arithmetic. Next week we’ll pull it all together with investments and valuations. But, being [...]