Preparing an effective executive summary
Today’s guest post comes from Ted Rosen, a partner at the law firm Fox Rothschild. How to write an effective company “teaser” is one of the most common topics I’m asked about by entrepreneurs and I think Ted has some excellent thoughts on how to prepare a company summary that hits the right points but isn’t so long that you’ll lose your reader’s attention (or make them abandon the summary before reading the important parts). Ted really nails it in the piece below. I’d especially call out “jargon free” and “keeping it simple” – the inverse of which are probably the two most common traits of poorly formed executive summaries. As always, I welcome comments, ideas, suggestions, etc. You can reach Ted directly at trosen@foxrothschild.com. …
September 28, 2010· 5 min read
Rewarding failure
This seems like an appropriate topic against the backdrop of my recent post on becoming more of a data driven organization. When you expose data, you expose not just those areas of your business that are doing well, but also those that aren’t. And this brings up an interesting question: Does your organization embrace failure or only reward success? Specifically, do you encourage people to create challenging goals and give them credit for the work they did trying to achieve them, or do you (implicitly or explicitly) encourage people to sandbag and as a result “overachieve”? The answer to this question may be more nuanced than you originally think once you sit down to consider it. In fact, most people in our society are programmed to reward overachievement rather than an effort that falls short of achieving a really high goal. But the behavior this can encourage is counter-productive to many business activities. And while we may pay lip-service to the “setting lofty goals” idea, the reality is that most companies don’t work this way. They have engineering deadlines, sales goals, etc and rather than creating a culture of setting aggressive targets and trying like hell to get there, they prefer the greater certainty and achievement of “managing expectations”. Failure is something to be defended against (and if you do fall short, there’s always a reason that’s not your fault). …
June 18, 2010· 2 min read
Data, Data and more Data
I had planned to title this post “If you have a data intensive business, don’t forget to look at your data.” But when I thought about, really all businesses are (or should be) data-intensive. And as a result all businesses should be obsessed with the data their systems generate. Measure. Track. Analyze. Adjust. Years ago I remember sitting in ServiceMagic board meetings when Rodney or Mike (the co-founders) would pull out a Blackberry and announce: “in the 45 minutes since this meeting began, we’ve made 62,135 dollars and 37 cents!” They were obsessed with their system data and they had designed their platform from the very start to allow them to pull out any and all data they wanted. They had access not just to revenue data, but to leads, customer contacts, call center calls, sales funnel changes, site visitors, marketing spend, etc – really anything that had an impact on their company. As a quant-geek myself, I really appreciated what went into the design of their systems that would allow them to surface these operating metrics so easily (not to mention the mindset of Rodney and Mike to insist that they had access to this information at all times). …
June 9, 2010· 2 min read
Are you “under-promising and over-delivering”?
Someone at a meeting I was in a few weeks ago made a statement to the effect that he valued management (sales management in particular) following this mantra. I couldn’t disagree more. While it makes for a great VC cliché it seems to me that it’s not a good plan to set an expectation with companies that you work with that you want them to essentially lie to you about the results they expect. Following this down the management line – from board to CEO to VP of Sales to Sales Manager to Salespeople – and you’ll completely cloud your view of what’s really happening in a business (where at every step of the way each person tries to set up an expectation that is lower than what they actually believe they deliver). …
April 7, 2010· 1 min read
If you read nothing else…
I’ve received a few lengthy emails recently that contained the following: IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE READ THIS SECTION While I suppose one could argue that this encourages the reader to skip over the rest of the email, I disagree. I think it’s brilliant. Each email was full of information – the kind that takes a good chunk of time to parse through and think about. They were the kind of email that ends up in your “read later when you have time” folder which would have been fine assuming that you 1) got back to it at all and 2) got back to it in a somewhat timely manner – they each required a response. The “READ THIS NOW” section was a single paragraph that summed up the information that I could now go through at my leisure as well as the action required in response to the email. Well done!
February 9, 2010· 1 min read
The “real” America
I’ve generally avoided political issues on this blog, but this isn’t something I can keep my mouth shut on. imageYesterday Meb Keflezighi became the first American to win the New York City Marathon in 27 years. Born in Eritrea on the east coast of Africa, Keflezighi moved to the US when he as 12 (more than 20 years ago), is an American citizen and has raced for the US Olympic team. …
November 3, 2009· 2 min read
How long should your “trial” period run?
I’ve had this running debate with a handful of friends – I’d love to throw it out there for comment. The questions at hand are 1) whether companies should offer a “free trial” period for their software/web service; 2) if they do, how long should it last; and 3) what information should you ask for before starting a trial (specifically should you ask for credit card information up front). Here are a few thoughts. I’d love to hear your opinion. …
October 30, 2009· 3 min read
AT&T wants to sell you better coverage
As you know, I’m no fan of AT&T. With that in mind I couldn’t help sharing this piece of news: AT&T is now offering customers the ability to pay up and purchase a 3G Microcell to use in their homes (since no-one it seems actually gets descent service at home). The device supports both voice and data usage (presumably the latter is only marginally useful since most consumers with data devices connect to their home wifi networks in house). …
September 22, 2009· 1 min read
Don’t Panic!
I was recently talking to someone about an issue in one of their portfolio companies (this was not a Foundry or Mobius company). The issue was pretty serious (it related to safety standards at the company that were being ignored and a resulting accident at the business) and the person relating this story was (understandably) pretty worked up and asking me what I thought they should do. My advice? image …
September 15, 2009· 2 min read
Community Hours
Brad, Jason and I are going to try something new in Boulder starting this fall – Community Hours at the TechStars bunker. We’re all fans of “random meetings” – taking meetings from people that have been referred to us or have taken the time to write to ask to get together – but sometimes struggle to fit them into our schedules (I’m particularly poor at this – scheduling them generally at random and breaking up many days with too many meetings and not enough time at my desk). …
August 28, 2009· 1 min read