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Featured Lessons learned

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Lessons Learned: Ellen Leanse of 222do believes in "extreme listening"

by John Shinal, January 29, 2008 | Comments

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Ellen Leanse learned a few things during her many years as an Apple Computer executive and, later, as a consultant to tech firms.She's now putting those lessons to work as founder and CEO of 222do, a company whose application lets social network users build and share lists easily. Click here to see our previous interview with Ellen where she explains 222do. Ellen was formerly Apple's User Evangelist, a position which gave her a sharp focus on the importance of a ...

Lessons Learned: Eric King says all the warnings are true

by Ezra Roizen, January 24, 2008 | Comments

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Eric King, the chief marketing officer of Clean Power Finance, doesn't sugarcoat his advice for startup entrepreneurs. "When you hear that it's going to take twice as much time and twice as much money as you thought to get to profitability -- (it's) all true," says King, who is also a managing director at the merchant bank Arena Group LLC. And where do all those unforeseen expenses come from? "People tend to underestimate salary costs or, conversely, they hire too ...

Lessons Learned: Carlyle Group's Bob Grady on markets and people

by John Shinal, January 22, 2008 | Comments

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Know your market; the sources of capital are your partners; hire the best people

Bob Grady, who heads the Carlyle Group's investments in venture and growth capital, has been watching startup companies succeed and fail for two decades.Before joining the huge private equity firm, Grady was a managing director at Robertson Stephens, the one-time San Francisco-based technology investment bank that took public many of the largest tech companies. Grady served as Robbie Stephens' lead ...

Lessons Learned: DanceJam's Geoffrey Arone on a clear, shared vision

by John Shinal, January 16, 2008 | Comments

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Before he co-founded DanceJam with rap legend MC Hammer, Geoffrey Arone was an executive with Flock, which makes a social Web browser that won product awards last year from the editors of CNET and Mashable.During his time there, however, Arone says that not everyone at Flock was working from the same script. While he wanted it to focus on video and other rich media, others felt it was more of a bloggers' browser.His experience at Flock, which was founded in ...

Lessons Learned: Topix CEO Chris Tolles says "be honest with yourself" about timing

by John Shinal, January 14, 2008 | Comments

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Chris Tolles, CEO of the news aggregation site Topix, says proper timing is critical to the success of any startup. Tolles should know, having been a co-founder of NewHoo, which created the Community Directory Project and was acquired by Netscape in 1998, and of Spoke, the social networking site for businesses. "We were a little early," Tolles says of Spoke, which was founded in 2002, before social networking sites had caught on. He left the company to join Topix in March ...

Lessons Learned: Ingres CEO Roger Burkhardt says "start with the customer"

by John Shinal, January 10, 2008 | Comments

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Too often, startup executives spend their early days focused solely on their technology. That can lead to the development of products that are cutting-edge and powerful but for which there is no market.There's another way, says Roger Burkhardt, CEO of Ingres, a provider of open-source database software and services."Start with the customer," says Burkhardt, who as the former CIO of the New York Stock Exchange was a buyer of enterprise hardware and software. You have to provide customers with a value ...

Lessons Learned: MC Hammer on innovation, faith and Charles O. Finley

by John Shinal, January 8, 2008 | Comments (1)

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Few businesses are as tough as the entertainment business.The percentage of professional musicians who make a living solely from their work is puny, and those who taste creative success often fail to build a profitable business based upon it. MC Hammer, who recently started DanceJam, is among those who've tasted the ultimate level of success in Hollywood. Yet he's also learned some hard-won lessons. "Your fortune can change, it can go up or down... business doesn't always go according to ...

Lessons Learned: Thom's 'Pablo by the Numbers'

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, January 4, 2008 | Comments (1)

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When one sees a book titled “Pablo by the Numbers,” one might expect to open up to pages of cubist artwork. Guess again. In this book, there won’t be paintings and sculptures of abstract, geometric forms that reject perspective in favor of ambiguous space. It’s not because there aren’t a lot of fragmented elements, analyzed, reduced and then reassembled into a new reality. Rather, it’s because the soon-to-be-released novel is about a man, whose life is laid out and relived ...

Lessons Learned: Zipidee's Henry Wong re-defines the letters C-E-O

by John Shinal, January 3, 2008 | Comments (3)

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Always think of bringing cash in; be doggedly optimistic, go after big markets

Zipidee founder and CEO Henry Wong says that the most important thing an entrepreneur needs to know is that "startups need cash all the time." That means startup CEOs should think of themselves as a "cash extraction officer" and should be talking to customers and investors all the time about how to bring more of the green stuff into their ...

Best of VatorTV 2007: Lessons from Tony Perkins, Blake Krikorian and Dan'l Lewin

by John Shinal, December 28, 2007 | Comments

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In this post, our last in a week-long series recapping the best of the Vator.tv newsroom in 2007, we share our most popular interviews with veteran entrepreneurs sharing their advice for startup execs. Outpacing the field was Bambi Francisco's conversation with Always On Network founder Tony Perkins, in which he shared the surprising revelation that News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch was one of his heroes. We started this series, which we call Lessons Learned, to give startup entrepreneurs access to the ...

Lessons Learned: Mark Cuban advises entrepreneurs to do their homework

by John Shinal, December 20, 2007 | Comments

	Sweat equity goes a lot further than a lot of money Mark Cuban belongs to a very select group of entrepreneurs who built a company with the right technology at the right time and then sold it to the right buyer at the top of a market.After going public, Broadcast.com was bought by Yahoo in 1999 for just over $5 billion in stock, making it one of the best exits for ...
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Don't take everyone's advice

by John Shinal, December 18, 2007 | Comments (1)

	Lessons Learned: Truveo's Tim Tuttle says don't take everyone's advice Tim Tuttle, who co-founded the video search firm Truveo in 2004 and sold it to AOL less than two years later, has a firm opinion on what sets an entrepreneur apart from others.While a lot of people have an idea for a business, those who have an actual business built on an idea weren't afraid "to step off the cliff," ...
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Lessons Learned: Plaxo CEO Ben Golub says you need great people to adapt to change

by John Shinal, December 13, 2007 | Comments

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Be willing to adapt and change; be passionate

When Ben Golub joined the contact-management site Plaxo in early 2005, the company had just been through a bit of a rough patch.Privacy advocates and some bloggers had questioned what the company planned to do with all the data it collected on its members, and other skeptics wondered how it would ever make money.Golub, whose experience at Internet security firm ...

Lessons Learned: Lightspeed Venture's Jeremy Liew says not every company should raise venture capital

by John Shinal, December 11, 2007 | Comments

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A VC's advice on how to meet with venture capitalists

Lightspeed Venture Partners' Jeremy Liew says entrepreneurs should approach raising venture capital the same way they would a video game that has levels of increasing difficulty. "You can't get to the top level without going through each step," says Liew, whose Silicon Valley firm evaluates thousands of startup business plans every year. "The point of sending an executive summary is ...

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