Category: Entrepreneurship

Whether you know it or not, this seems to be the way that alot of early stage companies make strategic and tactical decisions. People run around the halls and manage by crisis, moving from one deal or issue to the next without any overarching goals and process in place. Solving this not only requires better planning but also staying disciplined, holding you and your team accountable, and executing on those goals. Trust me, this is top of mind for me as this is the time of year that many companies start formulating their plans and goals for 2005. We have all been through a number of these so-called planning sessions and have come out with great plans and ideas, but the problem most of the time is that the execution of it never happens. Hopefully, some of my thoughts and suggestions below will help you simplify this process and create a framework to measure, manage, and execute.

So let me first start with accountability. Without accountability, it is hard to manage a business. What I typically like to see is a management team put together a few simple company goals, say 3-5, which are easy to remember and that can be measured by Yes/No answers. If you have too many goals or if you cannot measure them, then you cannot manage them. With simple Yes/No goals there should never be any ambiguity about completion. Those goals are usually then rolled out by department (3-5 goals that help the company realize its overall goals) so that marketing, sales, and engineering can be in synch with the company goals and so they can be easily monitored and measured by the executive team and board. Obviously you must be flexible and make course corrections through the quarter and year, but this process helps the executives all get on the same page and drive the company in the right direction. If you don’t have knock down, drag out fights over the company goals and the appropriate allocation of resources to realize them, then you are probably not challenging each other enough. Once the goals are set and agreed on, you must communicate and share them with the whole company.

By way of example, an overall goal could be to ship version 4.0. It is a pretty simple Yes or No proposition. Obviously when you roll it down to marketing and development, each department will have its own priorities to make the shipment of version 4.0 a reality. Whenever a new issue or opportunity arises your team can always ask themselves whether or not doing X can help them realize the goal. If not, then it is probably not worth doing. Yes, you have to be flexible throughout, but having a guiding light or north star to rely on can help you better manage your people and help your people better manage themselves. As you can see, when it comes time to running the business on a day to day basis, these goals can be quite helpful in moving your company from a Ready-Fire-Aim business to a Ready-Aim-Fire one. Remember, being an entrepreneurial company means by definition you have limited resources and need to allocate them appropriately to get the best bang for the buck.

Obviously it is quite difficult to cover the above topics in such a brief post, but I hope to dig deeper into the strategic plan and budgeting conversation in future posts. Maybe you can even suggest some other areas of interest for you?

I recently had a board meeting for one of my portfolio companies and was upset because during the sales pipeline review we only heard great things about the pipeline, new closed deals, and the possibility of beating our quarter yet again. What bothered me, however, was that we did not spend enough time discussing the big losses or missed opportunities. Evaluating losses is a great leading indicator for health in a business. If you can get to the heart of why you are losing deals early on, you can prevent big problems down the line. More often than not, management teams will do the opposite and revel in their victories and not spend enough time in defeat. Great management teams, however, will learn from their losses and missed opportunities – they will learn what went wrong and why to make sure it never happens again. This is like preventitive medicine – diagnose early before large problems arise. This, in my mind, is an important trait to institutionalize in a company. While hitting your quarter is a great thing, if you never take a proactive stance and do post mortems on lost opportunities, your competition will eventually catch up to you. Talk to the prospect and try to understand whether it was the process, the sales person, the product, pricing or competition. After a few of these data points, you will have a better view of why you lost and what you can do to fix it. I strongly believe that you can learn just as much from your losses as you can from your wins.

One of the recurring themes of dealing with VCs and boards is that we do not like surprises. In addition, tell us the facts, and if there are any negative surprises give us action steps on how you are going to remedy the situation. I have written about the VC/Entrepreneur relationship before and due to its importance will continue to write about it in this blog. Yesterday was one of those days where these themes kept surfacing in my conversations and email and I thought I would share a couple of examples with you.

In one meeting yesterday a VP of Sales candidate for one of my portfolio companies walked me through one of the biggest lessons learned in his first start-up experience – lay out realistic numbers and hit them. That means that if you do not have 100% confidence that you will hit the quarter, don’t pad your sales pipeline and wait until the end of the quarter to tell us about a potential miss. You are not doing us a favor by letting us feel like we are going to hit the quarter. Tell us as soon as you know – yes, board members can read between the lines as sales is a numbers game. In addition, explain the action steps you will take to solve the problem so it doesn’t happen again. To say the least, he learned alot from that first board experience.

Later in the day, I got an email from another portfolio company’s CEO outlining a potential issue with a key partner. Not only did I like the fact that he communicated with the board right away, but I loved how he included a detailed action plan to resolve the issue. This included securing a meeting with the decision maker ASAP. While all of us were concerned about the news and shared our own thoughts on the action plan, we all felt like we were doing all that we could to overcome the partner’s issues. In the end, I am sure it will work itself out, but it would have been utterly inexcusable if we learned about this after the fact.

Anyway, I hope these stories continue to hammer home the importance of working with your board in an open and collaborative manner. Look, bad things happen, but what gets a VC and board upset is not knowing soon enough, soon enough to potentially take corrective action.

If you ever wondered what it takes for a startup to succeed, please read the email below sent from the CEO of one of our portfolio companies to his whole staff. Sure, startups don’t have the cash, the people, the distribution channel, and brand to compete with the established players but passion, drive, and an insanely great product can take you a long way.

Dear team members:

I have always believed that the key reason for our continued success over the past few years has been, the contributions made by each and every one of you. Without your sincerity, commitment and hard work, we would not have become the #1 partner for Company X.

I want to share with all of you, an extremely powerful example of sincerity and commitment, shown by one of our fellow team members. I am sure that each one of you will feel proud of him after reading what he accomplished this week!

On Tuesday, July 13th, after finishing a bunch of very successful presentations in the Washington DC Area, John Smith (aka Mad Dog from his army days) took a flight for Memphis, TN where he had to do a presentation in the morning on Wednesday, July 14th. John had to change flights in Atlanta on the way to Memphis. Due to extremely bad weather on the east coast, his flight into Atlanta got delayed and he missed his connecting flight to Memphis. The next available flight to Memphis was the next day at noon, which would cause him to miss his morning presentation. So John asked the airline if they would reimburse him for a rental car to drive from Atlanta to Memphis, thinking that it would be a few hours drive. The airline agreed, so John rented a car and started driving to Memphis from Atlanta. John had been in touch with Dave when all this was going on, so after he started driving, Dave did a quick check on Mapquest and realized that it was a 400 mile, 7 hour drive and not a “few” hours drive as John had thought (it never hurts to be good at Geography!). But Mad Dog did not stop or turn around, he kept driving (with a few coffee breaks to help keep him awake at the driving wheel). He reached Memphis at 5:30 AM, rested for an hour at his hotel and went on to do his presentation – which was very well received. Folks, this story does not end here………..

John then took a flight from Memphis to Jackson, MS where he was scheduled to train 30 users for one of our major customers THROUGH THE NIGHT of Wednesday, July 14th! He got into Jackson, slept for a couple of hours and then went to the customers offices to conduct training for these 30 users from 10 PM to 5:30 AM! The training was extremely well received (I have received e-mails from the Company X Sales managers giving kudos to John for his quality of training that night). Today morning he flew from Jackson, MS back home to Dallas, TX.

John: I am very proud of your commitment and dedication to work. Please make sure you get some well deserved rest over the weekend.

PS: In the future, please call one of us from the airport to check how far your destination is, before you start driving!

Regards,

CEO of portfolio company

Everyone is talking about the slowdown of growth in the enterprise software sector as one of the main reasons driving consolidation talks at companies like Oracle/Peoplesoft and Microsoft/SAP. We all know that the enterprise software business characterized by large licenses and 20% annual maintenance revenue is lucrative but also hard as the big get bigger and the little guys disappear. Given the number of negative preannouncements this week from enterprise software companies, this Forrester graph from a CNET article summarizes the market quite well.

Looking at this graph, it is no surprise that companies are looking to consolidate. Given that maintenance revenue is such a large percentage of overall revenue and growing and given that it is also highly profitable, why shouldn’t some larger players in the market consolidate the industry, keep the maintenance revenue and cash flow, and stop everything else? With that backdrop, I find it quite interesting to learn that CA’s ex-CEO, Sanjay Kumar (the master of these deals), advised Oracle on their Peoplesoft acquisition. According to a New York Newsday article, here is what Sanjay had to say on Oracle’s strategy of buying Peoplesoft and gutting it:

At the same time, Phillips said Kumar advised “he would have the same plan post acquisition but just would not have said so up front. Everyone knows but you can’t say it and freak out the customers up front.”

As for which employees to keep and which to discard, Kumar, whose CA acquisitions were notorious for scuttling thousands of workers, offered clear advice.

“Don’t get rid of the presales folks; only the sales,” Phillips quoted him as saying. “The presales guys know the products and customers and they will get you easy add-on sales . . . and it would be crazy to forgo that revenue and those relationships . . . You don’t need the sales guy — those are for new account hunting.”

What does this mean for me from a venture perspective? Well, what I have believed for a long time is that it is hard for early stage companies to build direct sales models predicated on “elephant hunting” and going after huge deals. Each sale is incredibly long and expensive. In addition, as you can see from a number of large public software companies, revenue is lumpy and therefore less predictable as customers wait until the last day of the quarter to squeeze you for a larger discount. Despite this, we are still bullish on software companies selling to enterprises. In our mind it just requires a rethinking of what business models will work and why. Think seed and harvest – lower price points, more volume, lots of upsell over time. Think of software models with leverage – hosted software and modular software which can be resold, OEMed, and/or appliancized (if that is a word). So please read an earlier post for more detail.

Like any active, early stage venture investor, I have spent a fair amount of time helping my portfolio companies build a management team. And like any venture investor, I wish I could boil hiring down to a more scientific method to make sure that each person we bring on to a company is better than the next. However, that does not always happen. The one constant in hiring, however, is the “A-Player Domino Effect” which basically says that when you hire an A-Player, they bring lots of other A-Players to the table. Think about it this way. Why do so many people want to play for the Yankees? Sure, it is the cash, but it is also the opportunity to work with other A-Players to win a pennant that lures A-talent to New York. Same with the Lakers-Gary Payton and Karl Malone took pay cuts to join the Lakers and Shaq and Kobe to win a championship. I am not saying that in order to have a successful company you have to have a lineup of proven all stars since team chemistry plays a huge role. In fact, every company may have a different definition of what an A-Player looks like. Look at the Detroit Pistons, full of chemistry and a solid bunch of hungry players, who took out the all-star laden Lakers in the NBA Finals.

However, in many of my successful companies, the first couple of VP hires made all of the difference in the world in terms of attracting strong talent and positioning the respective companies for success. For example, one of my companies just brought in an experienced VP Sales from a competitor in the market. Once he signed, he brought on 2 of his top sales performers from his prior company along with the former head of sales engineering. This was great as it helped us fill out the team below the VP-level and brought the company known quantities who had worked with the VP Sales successfully at other companies. Another portfolio company brought on a great VP Engineering who brought 3 of his top guys with him. In each case, both VPs had a few people willing to follow them to the next opportunity. It is obviously a great sign when this happens. It shows me that someone can build a team, engender loyalty, and perform at a high and successful level. Every company or investor may have a different definition of an A-Player but one thing I can say for sure is that hiring an A-Player does not necessarily mean you have to hire the “big name” or “proven all star” in the industry. Many times, I have found A-talent from up and comers who are stepping up into a bigger role, have something to prove to themselves and the world, and just have incredible will and drive to make things happen. Of course, they have to possess the prerequisite industry experience, proven track record, etc. but the intangibles often make a big difference. In the end, great people like to work with other great people.

I met with Dave Panos and Andrew Busey of Pluck yesterday to learn more about their product and their company. Rather than go into the software (which I really like btw, combination RSS reader, bookmark manager, and simple collaboration tool), I wanted to share some of our thoughts about consumer-based web businesses circa 2004. We had a nice discussion about why it was different to launch a web-based business in today’s world versus the bubble period. It was even more interesting considering that Dave and Andrew were on their third or fourth startups, depending on how you count. Our conclusion was that it is so much easier and cheaper to build a web-based business today than in the early days of the Internet. OK, I am being master of the obvious, but I am interested to see what else you can add to the list below.

1. Critical Mass
During the bubble period, the promise and potential of the Internet was all around us. However, the critical mass was not there. Today, we have critical mass, a number of users that are experienced with the web. We have real broadband penetration (although not as high as Korea, for example). This obviously allows any new company to actually build a real business with real users that can throw off cash flow.

2. Technology/Experience
In the early years, people did not have off-the-shelf components and open standards like XML/SOAP to build web-based applications. If you wanted to build a chat program, you had to build the whole thing from scratch. In today’s world, you can pull an off-the-shelf component from an ISV or from the open source community, Jabber for example, and have chat instantly integrated in your product. Additionally, the developers 8 years ago were pioneering new applications and a new language. If you combine that same developer who is now seasoned with better technology, you get a great headstart in building new products. What used to take months now takes weeks to build. What used to cost millions now now costs a fraction of that. We have more capability built into the browser. Pluck and Onfolio, for example, are built and integrated into IE instead of being a separate application. We have toolbars galore built into IE. It works.

3. Business models
Andrew stressed the other main point which is that we know what business models work today versus yesterday. Paid search didn’t exist years ago. Today it is a multi-billion market. Portals were nowhere close to profitable and today they are. Companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and EBay have become big enough to build a business around-they have an ecosystem-they are the gorillas of the web and entrepreneurs can launch products around them. Additionally, we know how to reach users better and measure success. We are not throwing money away on stupid advertising campaigns. The smart and seasoned entrepreneurs now have more outlets for guerilla marketing (blogger community is a new and great one).

Remember the old adage that pioneers get arrows in their backs? Well, many early entrepreneurs did fail. Luckily, today’s entrepreneurs have the hindsight and ability to soak in all of the expensive lessons learned from the past. Now that is a tremendous advantage, one that will only get better with time.

Jerry Colonna has an insightful post on what it’s like to be a CEO of a venture-backed company. Having worked with Jerry on a board before, I find his advice quite practical and thoughtful. One takeaway from his post is about being overcommunicative with your board meaning that VCs do not like surprises. I totally agree as I’ve written about this before.

It is on the newswire today-Cometa Networks, the wi-fi service provider backed by IBM, AT&T, and Intel, is shutting down. There is much analysis out there discussing the merits of the business and what went wrong. In a recent News.com piece, analysts discuss how Cometa did not build critical mass quickly enough to make the economics work. Rather than focus on what went wrong, what strikes me about Cometa Networks is not the business or market it was going after, but the hype and attention it drew to itself way before its service was even in operation. It was all over the news (well done, by the way), but the problem is that it promised too much and never delivered. At the very least, if you are going to hype yourself, make sure you can deliver relatively quickly to capitalize on the buzz. When you have a grandiose launch you set high expectations for your company. As my colleague, Ben Tanen, put it, “they would have to be the next generation phone company” to deem their execution worthy of their launch. Anything short of that and they would be deemed a failure. Of course, this puts a ton of pressure on the team to deliver and exceed expectations. Along those lines, it even seems that the company was quite aggressive in its dealings with business partners, acting like a market leader even without a network (see Sky Dayton’s comments on wifinetnews). Call me understated, but I prefer my companies to “underhype and overdeliver” rather than “overhype and underdeliver.” So whether Cometa was a victim of the market or not, the way it was launched, one could claim it was a victim of its overambitious start. Even if they succeeded bit by bit they would have been seen as an underperfomer as it would have taken them years and a ton of capital to meet the hype that they generated from the initial launch.

This month seems to be my month for CIO meetings. Part of a VC’s job besides helping management with strategy and hiring people is to help with customer introductions and strategic partnerships. In this tough market, my partners and I have been doing our best to help along these fronts. While being in New York can be a disadvantage in terms of finding new companies and hiring great industry people, it is great for our access to customers and the Fortune 500. In New York, we can keep a close ear to the ground and learn about spending priorities and other short and long term problems that CIOs need to solve. This is yet another data point we can use to help us place our bets. I met with another CIO yesterday in the financial services market and thought you would be interested in hearing a few tidbits from the meeting.

1. IT Budgets are loosening up across the board for capital expenditures and people-lots to do, he is looking to hire people for the first time in a couple years, although he does not want to hire too many people if the market collapses in 6 months.

2. IT Priorities-one of the big areas of new spending will be for technology that supports revenue creation instead of cost cutting. For example, this includes making sure that the trading systems can keep pumping out transactions-there is alot more volume today with the market coming back and they have not upgraded their systems in a couple of years when they either overbought or were oversold too much technology. In addtion, his firm wants to upgrade existing applications (many run in old perl scripts and mainframes) and put them on a new application infrastructure like J2EE. Other high priority categories include business continuity/disaster recovery and security, which is not a surprise.

There was nothing earth shattering about this meeting except it does confirm my belief that spending is increasing and that CIOs are starting to look at expenditures that will help generate revenue for the first time in awhile. In addition, it seems that given his priorities, larger IT vendors like Dell, EMC, BEA, and Sun would benefit from his increased spend. As usual I spent some time pitching my companies and the first question he asked after each pitch was, “What other financial service customers do you have?” This is not unlike any other meeting with a CIO and just reminds me how hard it is for a startup to get its first, high-profile, referenceable customer as no one wants to be a guinea pig. Secondly, it shows how important it is to find the early adopters in a particular vertical and make them referenceable so their peers can follow. CIOs spend alot of time these days managing risk not taking on risk.