I made a simple change in my life a few weeks ago that ended up being much more dramatic than expected. For reasons extraordinarily practical – I wanted to keep my phone on at night when I was traveling without being woken up 30 times overnight with the ‘chrip’ of a new email – I turned off the email notification on my Dash. (I know – I could have created a new profile and programmed it to allow the phone to ring but I was in a hurry so I just modified my main profile.) A few days passed before I realized that I wasn’t constantly interrupting what I was doing at any given moment to check new emails as…
Archives / February, 2007
Is your VC a rockstar?
I had two people at VC in the Rockies this week say that VC’s were rockstars. I hope that’s not really what most VCs actually think. I always thought of entrepreneurs as rockstars. We’re just the groupies.
Venture Capital at Altitude
Every year the Colorado Venture Capital Association (soon to morph into the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association after combining with similar associations in a few neighboring states) puts on the “it” conference for Colorado venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and the lawyers, bankers, search firms, etc. that support us – Venture Capital in the Rockies. I love this event – it’s a great chance to see the best of Colorado deal flow and it concentrates pretty much everyone in the region who has anything to do with venture in one place for the better part of two days with plenty of opportunities to connect, catch up, share ideas, gossip, etc (oh – and did I mention that the conference is in Beaver…
Delivering bad news
Let’s say you have some bad news to deliver to your board/investors. For example, you lost a huge customer or your software has a major bug that’s going to set you back 6 months or your CFO just got arrested for cheating on his taxes, etc. Should you: Take out an advertisement in the Journal announcing this and then send out a note to your board with a link Rent one of those sign trucks and have it drive by your investors offices repeatedly Bury it deep inside a board book and hope no one notices it Don’t say anything – your investors/board are too involved in your business already and ask way too many questions as it is None…
Clarity
I was on a call recently where I had to ask someone 4 times to repeat what they were saying using more exact terms. It’s a major pet peeve of mine and so prevalent I’m losing my ability to be nice about it. Perhaps it’s a result of being a kinder, gentler society or maybe it’s just because we’ve all sat through too many PowerPoint presentations or maybe we’re all testing our political-speak skills, but whatever it is the result is the absolutely maddening trend of people not saying directly what they mean and forcing the rest of us to play 20 questions to tease it out of them. Here’s an example: Direct description: This is a red circle “Business”…