It’s All About Building Great Companies

Through my career, I have been passionate about building things. First, I built hardware, then software, and then I built organizations. Starting from an idea, a brainstorming session with a whiteboard, and seeing it turn into a reality down the road is among the most interesting endeavors we get to pursue.

New Book

Seminars

Market Entry Strategy

A seminar for seed and Series A companies

This class summarizes decades of experience helping management teams in one of the most critical phases of a startup life: market entry. Many of the entrepreneurs I have worked with directly suggested I blog or somehow share my accumulated knowledge. This 2 hour class is my attempt at doing so. It provides detailed suggestions and hands-on exercises to focus your market entry, build your sales strategy and develop a plan for success

The class has now been given many times and attended by close to 1,500 entrepreneurs who recommended I give it to their friends and colleagues. 

CEO – Board Relations

A seminar for all private companies

This class is intended for CEOs and other executives that participate in board meetings and can be interesting to other board members. It describes the roles and responsibilities of the board attendees. Most importantly it recasts the relationship between the CEOs and their boards in a way that is constructive and enables the board to be a productive asset for the CEOs.

This is a new class and is complementary to the Market Entry class.

Building a company is so much like racing a sailboat.

I am a competitive sailor in my pastime and I always find inspiration for analogies between racing a sailboat and running a startup. Nobody ever summed it up as completely and clearly as Diane Greene, the co-founder of VMWare. I hope it resonates with you, too.

“You need a plan and then the ability to reevaluate the plan in real time as new information is acquired. Suddenly, the wind changes or competitors are stronger than you thought they’d be. Each mark in the race is a milestone where you need to look up and evaluate what you’re doing, how you’re doing. When you skipper a sailboat, you need to be in the moment. You need to let go of your self-doubt, and yet you can’t lose the ability to question your decisions. Most of all, when it’s time to make a decision, as competitors come upon you or the wind shifts, you make it. The race won’t wait for you. And finally, when you race a sailboat, the selection of your crew is just completely paramount. It’s impossible to be an effective skipper if you don’t have the right people working harmoniously in the right roles.”

Diane Greene, VMWare Founder