Archive | June, 2006

Top-heavy teams

Jun 24, 2006
in Entrepreneurship

I met with a 10 person company the other day and once I got to Slide 2, I immediately started having questions about the opportunity.  What struck me was a company that had a CEO, COO, and a VP of Marketing and a VP of Sales.  You have probably heard this many times before but [...]

Read full story • Comments { 13 }

Product pricing and gravity

Jun 15, 2006
in Entrepreneurship

When you first release your product to the market, it is extremely important to think long and hard about product pricing. I can’t tell you how many meetings I have had where I have thought that companies were giving too much away for too cheap a price. Or they have given their product or service [...]

Read full story • Comments { 3 }

Greenplum’s first reference customer

Jun 5, 2006
in Entrepreneurship, Open Source

Congratulations to Greenplum (full disclosure: portfolio company) as it announced its first referenceable customer, Frontier Airlines, last week.  To refresh your memory, Greenplum develops software that allows customers to deploy terabyte scale datawarehouses leveraging PostgreSQL at significant price/performance advantages over exsiting solutions.  Building credibility is an important step for startups and getting referenceable customers and [...]

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

My favorite wireless app

Jun 5, 2006
in Wireless

While the Motorola Q phone got delayed in its release, I went out and got the new Cingular Blackberry 8700c a few months ago.  Since then, my hands down favorite application has been Google Maps for my device.  Call me cheap, but I have always hated using 411 service and getting charged exorbitant rates for [...]

Read full story • Comments { 1 }

Don’t forget that vision thing

Jun 3, 2006
in Entrepreneurship

I recently sat in a presentation which a portfolio company CEO gave for a potential strategic partner.  He first started out with a two minute explanation of the business and then insisted on diving into the demo.  I wasn’t sure if that prospective partner really got it and before we knew it, the CEO said [...]

Read full story • Comments { 9 }