Advisor Career Launch Event Guide: Fill & Download for Free

My friend Alba launched an education based project (http://www.rockthepost.com/posts/view/287/HELP-MOTIVATE-LOWINCOME) and it was extremely successful."My idea is to create a committee with mentors who will not only throw events in these school’s auditoriums, inspiring and motivating the students, but they will also work with them individually, guiding them through their academic journey until they feel certain enough to make smart decisions concerning their careers. While volunteer mentors are more than welcome, the committee will hire motivated teachers in their respective schools, advisors, career counselors and professionals in different areas (business, art, education etc.)"Read more about the project. Rock The Post actually just launched a new site so check it out!

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups, the industry’s standard textbook on the subject:The way that the world’s best universities turn out the brightest, most successful graduates is that they start by enrolling the brightest and most successful applicants. Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and their ilk do their best to get a large number of the country’s top students to apply for entrance. They send admissions representatives to every major high school; they use the SAT mailing list to recruit top scorers; they prevail on their alumni to host regional parties to attract local student leaders. In 2013, those three schools alone had 75,000 applicants. Having welcomed all those applications with open arms, the schools then proceed to winnow their applicant pool to the 6 to 7 percent they eventually accept.As an angel investor you will do the same thing, but you must be even more ruthless than the Ivy-est of the Ivies. For every investment I make this year, there had better be 40 serious, passionate entrepreneurs sitting on my doorstep, of whom I will only invest in one. That means I need to be three times pickier than Yale, Harvard, and Stanford when it comes to the decision process. It also means that I must develop extensive top-of-the-funnel opportunities from which I will choose the ones on which I place my bets.Thanks to the recent development of online platforms that have fundamentally changed the nature of the discovery process (thousands of new startups every month post their investor-focused profiles on Gust), it is easier than at any time in history to seek out innovative, exciting opportunities.The best and most successful angels spend much of their time proactively looking for hidden startup gems, an advantage described by venture capitalists as proprietary deal flow. What follows are some of the routes that you can use to develop your own opportunities, so that your investments will ultimately be selected from a pool containing the entrepreneurial equivalents of only 800 SAT, 4.0 GPA, class valedictorians who are curing cancer while conducting symphony orchestras and tutoring underprivileged children.Personal ConnectionsTo broaden the range of opportunities they see, and to insure that those they do see are the kinds of companies they’re looking for, many angels prefer to have opportunities referred to them from people they know. That is not because they’re elitist, but because experience has shown that the odds favor ventures where a known, trusted entity has done the preliminary vetting.This is actually easier than it sounds. In today’s hyper-connected world, it is practically impossible not to know someone who knows someone who knows the entrepreneur who would be a perfect match for your portfolio. In my case, there are over 16,000,000 people who can reach out to me through a first-, second-, or third-degree connection on LinkedIn, the business networking website. Do the math and you will probably nd that the numbers in your case are comparable. Personal connections are also important in the context of online funding platforms like Gust, where you can specify that the only opportunities you want to see are ones that have been referred by someone you know. While there will always be cases where early-stage investors cold-call cool companies whose sites they have happened across, and thereby discover the great success story of the next decade, such instances of serendipity are rare. Many investors will tell you that the majority of their investments are sourced from personal networks they have cultivated over the course of their careers. These include companies referred by CEOs whom the investor has already backed; other investors with whom the investor co-invests; and people with whom the investor worked at other points in his career.Personal connections are also a good way to find companies that match your personal interests, talents, background, and other non-financial resources. In the real world, money is fungible, so given two potential investments with an equal shot at success, the decision will come down to externalities such as connections, wisdom, integrity, interpersonal relationships, and other intangibles.For precisely these reasons, angels appreciate it when an entrepreneur with an interesting deal can explain why that particular angel is someone they want as an investor. After all, would you want someone to marry you just for your money? Or would you prefer to hear that they are dating you because they feel you would be a great life partner?Beyond personal connections, a major source of opportunities (particularly for early stage and seed deals looking for initial rounds of funding) is direct approaches from entrepreneurs who have seen, heard, or read about the investor, and believe that the investor would be a strong addition to their team. That’s why some of the best angels have the best deal flow: they go out of their way to contribute to the community through writing blogs, speaking at conferences, and tweeting out interesting industry-related items.Angel GroupsIf you are just getting started in angel investing and don’t have many personal startup contacts yet, an excellent strategy is to join a local group of established angel investors that actively welcomes new members at the level at which you’re planning to invest. When angel investors band together and put out the welcome mat for submissions, they typically receive dozens or more applications each month and have a multistep process through which they review opportunities. This is a great way to get ready-made, pre filtered deal flow and a lot of collegial handholding as you learn the ins and outs of angel investing.MeetupsIn 2001, soon after the dot-com crash, New York entrepreneurs Scott Heiferman and Matt Meeker founded a website with an unusual premise: to persuade people to turn off their computers and meet off-line. Meetup.com was born, and today it is used by over 15 million people in over 150,000 groups to organize nearly half a million local, in-person, get-togethers each month. Thousands of these meetups relate directly to new ventures, startup entrepreneurs, and innovative companies. In most cases, the program for the meetup will include demonstrations—often the first public showing—of products or services from one or more intriguing startups seeking seed funding.Our local startup group in New York is the NY Tech Meetup founded by Scott himself with Dawn Barber, which now has over 60,000 members (the single largest group on the Meetup platform). Of course we can’t fit all our members into a lecture hall at the same time, so competition is tough for the 800 inexpensive tickets available each month. During the two-hour meeting, a dozen companies will demonstrate their new products. It was at one of these events that I first saw Social Bicycles (now JUMP Bikes) and chased the CEO down the hall pleading to be allowed to invest.Even if none of the demonstrating companies catches your fancy, the odds are good that many other attendees may have a cool startup themselves. Regularly attending one or more of your local tech/startup meetups is a great way to discover new deal ow and to integrate yourself into the fabric of your local entrepreneurship ecosystem.Business Plan CompetitionsWith entrepreneurship having become mainstream, most business schools and many universities have integrated business plan competitions into their academic programs and extracurricular activities. In the old days, these were just what the name implied: events at which students would present theoretical plans for new businesses. Over the past few years, however, they have evolved into pitch events for real companies that have already been started, and in many cases are already generating revenue. Participants may include students, professors, and alumni, and the companies that present are usually at the perfect stage for angels to become involved. It was at the NYU Business Plan Competition that I first saw Pinterest, Comixology, CourseHorse, Social Bomb, and other exciting ventures.Startup Conferences and Launch EventsThe big brothers of business plan competitions are major industry events where new companies apply to be selected for introduction to investors, the press, and potential corporate partners. Some of these events are specially focused on new company introductions, and the audience sees every presentation. Others are general industry conferences that include a startup competition or launch segment as one part of the scheduled program. Among the annual industry events that have competitive launch venues for new startups are the following:DEMO. This is the matriarch of launch conferences, at which I introduced my first tech company, Ex Machina, in 1991, and Gust, 20 years later. Produced by the computer industry media giant IDG, DEMO has high production values and is a good way to see 50 to 75 companies launch at the same time. The primary requirement for presenters is that they launch a new product or company at the event. The audience tends to be corporate-, investor-, and press-focused, and launches include a mix of new startups and new products from major companies.Disrupt. Disrupt, when it was first held in 2008 under the name of TechCrunch40, was the brash newcomer, taking on DEMO head to head. In the years since AOL acquired the TechCrunch website and conference, Disrupt has grown in size and spread to other cities, becoming an expected stop on the launch path of many startups. With companies exhibiting in Disrupt’s Startup Alley, presenting on stage, or competing in its Disrupt Battlefield, these conferences can showcase over 200 startups competing for investors’ attention.South by Southwest. SXSW, as it is universally known, began as a spring Music Festival in Austin, Texas. It soon added a Film Festival before the music events and then layered on an interactive conference, showcasing panels, sessions, and exhibits from tech and media companies. The Interactive Festival includes a multiday startup competition known as the Accelerator (for which I have served as a judge on several occasions), and hundreds of lectures, panels, launches, and other activities throughout Austin for an entire week. SXSW is a rapidly growing powerhouse on the startup scene.CES. The International Consumer Electronics Show, held every January in Las Vegas, is a good place to do tech-investing homework. The value to an investor of attending this mammoth, week-long show (aside from the general fun and parties) is to get an immersive, instant overview into the current state of consumer electronics technology. While it is too noisy and crowded for a small company to launch a product effectively (with the possible exception of smaller, CES-based launch venues like ShowStoppers, or the CES Startup Pavilion), if you want to stay up to speed with the pace of technological advancement, CES can be a good experience.Other conferences and events that showcase new and exciting startups include the Launch Festival in San Francisco, produced by Jason Calacanis; VatorSplash, from the team at Vator.tv, SoCap, presenting social ventures “at the intersection of money and meaning”; Early Stage East, originated by the late David Freschman; Ingenuity from the New York Venture Capital Assocation; FashInvest, showcasing fashiontech startups; and many events produced annually by SIIA, the Software & Information Industry Association. There are specialized conferences in every industry segment, from financial services to clean technology, publishing to fashion, education to enterprise software.At such conferences, startups introduce their product or service to the public for the first time, often by demonstrating on stage, exhibiting at a booth, putting out press releases, and opening the doors to their initial public users. You will usually have the opportunity to see a short demonstration of the product or site, and then be able to speak directly with the company’s founders.Accelerator Demo DaysThere has been an explosion of startup incubators and seed accelerator programs in recent years, most modeled after the successful YCombinator accelerator in Silicon Valley founded by Paul Graham. These programs, such as TechStars, Wayra, DreamIt! Ventures, Launchpad, Astia, Founder Institute, and others, do an amazing job of raising the level of entrepreneurial startups. I will discuss the role of accelerators at greater length in Chapter 15, but now just note that each accelerator program, which typically lasts three months, ends with a Demo Day, to which a number of local angel investors and venture capitalists are invited. These are something like a debutante’s coming out party, and the onstage presentations by the companies are such exquisite productions that you may be tempted to write checks immediately to all 15 to 20 companies.Online Deal SourcesFinally, the fastest growing sources of opportunities—in terms of sheer numbers—are online equity funding platforms for Accredited Investors. Although Gust is the largest of these platforms, there are many smaller ones already in operation, and more being established every month.Many of these websites curate a limited number of startup companies seeking funding, list them online, and then let individual investors put in small amounts of money that is combined with that of, other investors to fund the company. With estimates of as many as 300 funding platforms launched or in the works following the passage of the JOBS Act of 2012, it is important that prospective investors do their due diligence on the platform before they look at specific companies. Among the reputable online funding sites already in operation are Seedrs, SecondMarket, and AngelList. As noted previously, there are also specialized sites that deal in film funding (Slated), consumer brands (Circle Up), real estate (Realty Mogul), accelerator graduates (Funders Club), and other industries.Deal BrokersWhat if you are approached by a startup that is using a paid advisor to find investors? This person is called a broker, finder, or intermediary, although they may sometimes style themselves as investment bankers. Most angels, and virtually all organized angel groups, tend to be averse to participating in brokered funding rounds.There are many reasons for this, but in essence early-stage investors want all their cash going into the company, not out the door to an intermediary. They also have personal networks for deal sourcing that make them pro-active investors, rather than re-active. Finally, anyone receiving money in exchange for helping in the sale or purchase of stock must be registered as a broker/dealer under the rules of the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission. In my experience, the majority of intermediaries who approach me about funding a company are not broker/dealers, and thus operate outside the SEC rules, which is never a good thing.The situation is different, however, in private equity, even at the low end, where brokers are the norm, not the exception. And there are certain groups of investors, such as family offices or casual angels, who may be more likely to consider brokered opportunities.What to Expect When You Meet a FounderThere is a huge imbalance between the number of would-be business founders (millions) and the number of serious investors looking for startups in which to put their money (thousands). If you are a serious investor, you can expect to be courted by company founders—if not besieged by them. You will need to exercise patience, discipline, tolerance, and a willingness to say a polite but firm “No” when necessary to retain some semblance of sanity when deluged by startup pitches— many are likely to be unattractive or inappropriate for your personal investment preferences and goals.I spend a lot of time counseling entrepreneurs on the ways they interact with investors, with the goal of making the conversations between these two mutually dependent parties as interesting and productive as possible. I urge company founders to be respectful of the limited time and energy of investors. That means, among other things, holding back on setting up meetings until the founder is ready to pitch. And “ready to pitch” means having a product in the market (or at least a prototype done), a team assembled (or at least the key people), a well-crafted financial plan, and a clear and detailed investor pitch refined and rehearsed, with all the necessary backup materials in one place (such as a company profile on Gust).The bottom line is that you need to avoid wasting time scrutinizing startups that are not ready for prime time. But once you’ve begun to have a flow of possible investment ideas cross your desk, the next challenge—an even bigger one—is to identify opportunities worthy of your time, attention, energy, and (ultimately) money. Which companies deserve your in-depth scrutiny? I’ll tackle that question in the next chapter.

Here are 54 mistakes I've made as a first-time entrepreneur and co-founder of CB Insights. Some of these are stupider and more serious mistakes than others, but they're all mistakes. I hope this list is useful, provides a laugh, or lets you see that you’re not the only one.As you’ll see, my screw-ups span all facets of building a company – everything from HR to culture to product to sales to operations to admin. I am what you might call “multi-talented.”So here they are in no particular order, bucketed by category. You’ll notice that some of these screw-ups sorta contradict each other. Yup – building a company is messy.The original post I wrote with these screwups is here - 54 Mistakes of a Startup CEOEnjoy.Culture#1 – Thought culture would just happenThis is my biggest learning by far as CB Insights scales. I thought if we just hired smart people, built cool stuff and made customers happy, culture would just happen.I learned that it would just happen, but leaving it to chance would mean that we wouldn’t be the culture we want. Building the operating system of the company the way we want is something that must be actively worked on.As a step one, we’ve created a Culture Code. As new teammates join who’ve not seen the leaner times (crappy offices, product woes, etc), the culture code will serve as their guide on what is expected of them and what they can expect from the organization. We’re also putting in place tactics, strategies and actions to ensure the Culture Code is not just words but is consistent with how we act.#2 – Didn’t do enough 1 on 1′s with folks on the teamRegular feedback (both ways) is important. I didn’t do this enough which results in people not knowing how they are doing or me getting feedback on how I’m doing. This type of feedback loop is important especially in a fast growing company where things can change frequently. This lack of feedback was one of the challenges I saw when I worked in a big company. I’d get an annual performance review, and they’d say “you need to work on X” and I’d think to myself, “why did you wait till year end to tell me this?”Trying to remedy this.#3 – No 360 feedbackWe never had asystematic way for teammates to give feedback to each other (and to me). It can be hard to deliver tough messages in person, but if we want to really improve we need to facilitate a way to do this.#4 – Provide more context about company directionSince we sit in an open floor plan, I kind of assumed everyone knew what was going on because they can hear me and others. The problem with my logic is that everyone too busy *actually working* to sit around and listen to me.So while people are aware of the tactical week-to-week stuff, the big picture stuff about where we are going, why and how hasn’t been covered as well as it should have been. Looking back, I really underestimated the importance of the big picture stuff in providing context to the team to help them become more successful.#5 – Keep folks updated on everyone’s workThere would be mornings when the biz dev would be doing a demo and see a whole new feature or improved interface on the product that they had no idea about before. This is not good.We just weren’t doing a great job of letting everyone know what others were working on. Knowing what others are working on is a good thing as it helps us do our jobs better. If our research team is doing content that our biz dev should know about for customers, that’s a good thing. If the research team is seeing a certain visualization take off, the product and dev teams should know about that. This exchange of information benefits everyone.#6 – Terrible on-boarding of new teammatesWe’d throw new teammates into the deep end. Setup your computer on your own, a nebulous project and ad hoc intros to the team. We’re scrappy, right?That goes with the territory.Wrong.Our “onboarding” process (it was generous to call it that) reminded me of this great HR joke I read on First Round Review:You’re greeted at the pearly gates to heaven by St. Peter who asks where you’d like to spend eternity. “Well, heaven of course!” you say. Peter replies: “You have to check out hell just to see what you think before you commit.” Disappointed, you shrug but agree. And to your surprise, when the elevator doors open into hell, you see golden beaches, golf courses, gorgeous people mingling with colorful drinks. It’s not what you expected, but maybe heaven is even better, you think. So you take the elevator back up, but all you find there is a bunch of dull harp-playing on clouds. There doesn’t even seem to be anything great to eat.You go back to Peter: “I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but I think I’d rather go to hell,” you say. “So it shall be,” he says, and you head back down to start your new afterlife. Only this time, when the doors open, you’re met with fire, brimstone and flowing lava. “What is this?” you yell. “Where’s the beach? What happened?” Your welcoming committee stares at you blankly: “Oh,” they say. “Yesterday we were recruiting you. Today you’re staffed.”While this wasn’t our intention, of course, this was the message we sent to new teammates. We painted a great picture to get you here, but now that you’re here, go figure it out.The type of onboarding we did is so suboptimal, I can only laugh in retrospect that we thought it was ok.With the hard work of Jeneuse, Forrest and Harrison on the team, we’ve redone the onboarding process from top to bottom. It’s not perfect, but new teammates have a much better experience than folks used to, and it continues to get better as we focus on it. Thankfully.#7 – Ring the gong more even to celebrate small winsOrganizations don’t go from being unsuccessful to magically successful over night. It is not binary – there are degrees of success over time. From my point of view as a founder / CEO, we are moderately successful today, but….we could be a lot more successful. With that said, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate small wins and accomplishments *today*.Celebrating these doesn’t mean we’re less hungry or less focused on the end game. It’s just a nice way to recognize that we have momentum and ensure the team knows it.#8 – Eat together more as a teamWe provide a lunch stipend for the team, so everyone orders from Seamless for lunch. While I’ve seen more and more folks grabbing lunch together in the kitchen area, I think getting the team together for lunch more frequently would be a good thing. It becomes logistically challenging as we grow, but there’s value in getting the team all together and doing this while we still can.#9 – Didn’t give people clear enough instructions assuming they’d figure it outWhile we continue to prize resourcefulness, it’s not an excuse for providing half-baked directives and say “figure it out.” Getting better at fleshing out requirements for everyone is important as it will ultimately speed us up.Human Resources & Hiring#10 - Hired smart folks and said we will figure it out laterThis might be an effective strategy if you are Google with lots of big problems and where you can just find a home for smart folks, but at a growing company, this hasn’t worked for us. In the past, we’ve hired really smart people without clear roles for them in the hope of figuring it out as we went along.We don’t have the organizational structure or time to figure this out, and it’s not fair to these teammates either. Smart people want to actively manage their career and have aspirations for where they want to be. We tried to figure things out on the fly, which may sound appealing and exciting in the beginning, but it never worked for us or them.#11 – Hired under pressureEvery time I’ve cut corners to fill a role or hired because I felt that “we really need someone in this role” it never has ended well.#12 – Fired too slowI have agonized over these decisions – wasting time, getting aggravated and just not taking action. Beyond the time lost, the work we needed done was not getting done. In a big company, having a team of 30 with some folks not holding their own is fine, perhaps. In a young, fast growing tech company, it’s unacceptable. I should have made the hard decision quicker and moved on with life.#13 – Poor anticipation of where we need to hireI didn’t always think ahead about staffing needs as I should have. As a result, we ended up hiring too late, which meant that certain key areas weren’t covered as well as they should have been.#14 – Moved slow on game-changing hires and lost themI’ve talked to a few candidates over time who I really think might have been game changers. But I moved too slow or got bogged down on details and lost them.#15 - Believed in the new hire messiahI tended to “fall in love” with new hires and think they’d come in and magically solve some intractable problem we had. The problem is my expectations/hopes were unrealistic and I often found myself disappointed. Now, I try to have more reasonable expectations. And sometimes, I get surprised which is amazing. But banking on the new hire messiah is something I no longer do.#16 – Be careful of hiring the annoying or assholes.Skills change, personality doesn’t.#17 - Didn’t check references and didn’t know how to do good reference checksThere were times when I actually didn’t check references. What a royal F up. Never again.Besides not checking references, I didn’t know how to check them. I just used to do them as a formality to rubber stamp a decision we’d already made as a team. Now I ask hard questions during reference checks and have learned to read between the lines. General rule – if the references are not effusive, the person won’t get an offer.#18 – Experimented with remote workers too earlyWe hired remote workers before we’d really figured out our workflow and basic processes. It was a colossal failure. We may explore this again in the future, but we just tried it too early.#19 – Hired customer success earlierWe had a really good retention rate from the beginning, but as we picked up the pace of product development, it hurt us not to have someone actively working to ensure customers were aware of new features to help them be successful with the product.Assuming customers will figure out new capabilities is not a reasonable expectation of them. It’s not a customer’s job to figure out how we can be valuable to them. It’s our job to do that.The other powerful aspect to customer success has to do with the idea of negative churn. I highly recommend reading these posts by Lincoln Murphy, Christoph Janz and Tomasz Tunguz if you’re not familiar with the concept.Pricing#20 – Thought cheap pricing would help us winWe tried to compete on the price front when we started and in retrospect, it was the wrong dimension to compete on. Now, because we price based on value, our pricing is up more than 10x, which helps us focus on the right types of customers and product capabilities to serve their needs.#21 – Got too cute with pricingBelow is a screenshot of an early version of our pricing page. Ever heard of a “Limo Plan”? Of course not.I think part of me thought people would just love this page and it would magically go viral or something like that. Ha ha. That was dumb.Sales & Marketing#22 – Didn’t focus on sales enoughWe are first and foremost a technology and product-driven company. If I ever had an extra minute in the day, I always gravitated towards doing product “stuff”. As a result, we spent a lot of time on product tinkering in the beginning instead of “getting out of the office” and selling CB Insights. My slowness in getting us selling has had bottom line impacts, in that we should have made a lot more money earlier than we did.#23 – Tried to use jargon to sound bigger & more “institutional”I seemed to think that using terms like “best practices” or “synergy” or “socialize” made us sound more institutional and serious. In reality, it isn’t consistent with the tone and brand we want to build and to be honest, it made us sound robotic, douchey and boring.This has had a direct impact on our newsletter subscriptions. One of the reasons our newsletter has been growing so quickly is that we’ve adopted a more conversational tone and talk to people like people. In February 2013, it stood at 10k subscribers. By May 2014, we were at 27,400 and as of today (6.5 months later), it has grown to 50,000+ subscribers.Of course, dropping jargon isn’t the only or primary reason for the growth of the newsletter (the data-driven content by our data science team is the main reason).#24 – Thought partnerships would solve distributionI thought our initial inability to sell could be solved by signing up partners who’d sell and market for us. These deals took time to strike and never worked. If we can’t sell the product ourselves, thinking someone else could sell it was the epitome of stupid.#25 – Wasted time on poor quality leadsWe get between 100-200 trial signups per day on average aka leads. Earlier, we used to waste time on every lead instead of prioritizing. This sounds so elementary in retrospect, but initially, we wanted to get everyone and so we spent time on folks with limited budget and buying power. The result of this with a small team was that we wasted time on bad leads and good leads sometimes went ignored. Scoring leads based on a number of factors ranging from organization size to the person’s seniority to their engagement with CB Insights during the trial is something we’ve begun doing to ensure we’re allocating resources and attention to the right leads.#26 – Tried to have pricing that worked for all peopleWhen we launched 4.5 years ago, we tried to have institutional pricing as well as pricing for startups. I was afraid to pick a market because “having options” seemed like a good idea. We quickly realized that picking a market gives us clarity in our messaging and approach, helping us to narrow our market a bit.#27 – Didn’t meet customers in real life enoughFor a long time, I actually thought in-person meetings and sales were a relic of a bygone era. What I’ve learned is that providing a glimpse into where we are going provides us with fantastic insights into what we should be doing more of with our product and what we’re doing poorly. They also are great for providing us competitive intelligence and general market insights and often, they also lead to new business by virtue of referrals.These interactions take various forms. Sometimes, it’s a dinner like the one we hosted with 10 corporate M&A and strategy clients in San Francisco. Sometimes, it’s having customers come into the office to meet our product team to highlight what they’d like to see our product do more of / less of. With these customer meetings, we occasionally see common trends emerge which helps tell us what we should be prioritizing. For example, Steve Schlafman of RRE and Amish Jani of FirstMark Capital both came by the office and in our conversations, both independently mentioned the CB Insights Chrome Plugin as something they use frequently. We were not doing a lot to enhance the plugin in all honesty, but their feedback made us see that we should be doing more with the plugin to make it more valuable.#28 – Took rejection too personallyIf we signed on 5 new customers in a week but lost 1, I fixated on the loss. While churn is obviously an important lever in the growth of a SaaS company, my focus on the loss was counterproductive. I should have figured out with the team what we can do better in those cases and then move on. I should have also celebrated the victories we’d just had. Not getting excited about the wins is just not a good motivator for the team.#29 – Tried to be a “salesy” sales guyI had never done sales before CB Insights. In the beginning, I thought sales had to be done in a certain sales-y, “sell ice to an eskimo” sort of way. That is not me. I’m an introverted guy by nature and trying to do this was a big giant fail. When I started “selling” by just highlighting my understanding of the client’s needs and challenging them to think of ways to do things better using us, things started to click.#30 – Didn’t ask enough questions in sales conversationsI’m not a natural salesperson nor had I ever really observed what really good salespeople do. So my view of sales was I give my pitch and the customer will or will not buy. What this meant was that in sales calls, I’d drone on and on oblivious to the client as my goal was to hit on my checklist of features.The results of this robotic, talking at sales process weren’t great.Then, I started talking to people who’d done sales before who shared a lot of insights with me. The biggest was about asking questions and making it a dialogue or conversation. When I started asking questions that helped me understand their pain points, the conversations were much better and the results improved.#31 – Poor post demo follow upI’d have a great demo but would not follow up appropriately to ensure they were getting value out of their trial. This is a surefire way to have a sub-optimal close rate.#32 – Didn’t ask for saleI used to be hesitant to ask for the sale thinking it was somehow uncouth to do that. Again, this was foolish. By not asking for the sale, I dragged out eventual sales and also spent too much time on folks who had no chance of actually converting. Getting to no quickly is only 2nd best to getting a yes quickly. Dragging things on with a client is never useful or a good idea. Asking for the sale prevents this.#33 – Would spoon feed objections to prospectsDon’t give prospects a reason not to buy your product. I used to do this, and there is no good reason for it. Here’s an example from when I used to do this.I would demo Investor Search on CB Insights and at the end of demo’ing, I’d say something likeWhile this search tells you all the active investors in the Internet of Things, it won’t tell you who has been most active.We now have Rankings search on CB Insights to do this, but before we did, you couldn’t do it. That said, there was no point in me saying the above. Our investor search is a great tool, and I’d just shown the prospective customer something that only CB Insights can do. But I negated all that by telling them about something it couldn’t do. They might not have even cared about that capability, but I now planted a seed of doubt in their mind and probably made them wonder “What other things can’t CB Insights do?”There was no good reason to do this. Prospective customers are going to ask questions about whether the product will meet their needs. When they do, we should answer honestly about what is possible or not possible. But giving customers reasons to not buy the product was a very bad sales strategy.#34 – Wasted time trying to find new customer acquisitions channels. Didn’t exploit what worked.I spent a lot of time thinking about new channels to acquire customers without exploiting what we were already good at. Our data-driven research content was inconsistently published, as was our newsletter’s cadence (though when we did it, it worked). This was driven by a lack of understanding our metrics as well as my desire to find the next new thing. As a result, we wasted time on new channels rather than sticking to content.Once we realized this, we course corrected and now have a killer content / data science team of 6, which we’ll expand to 10-12 in 2015.If you think you could head up the group, we’re looking for an editor-in-chief.#35 – Gotten our sweet t-shirts earlier and send them to customersCustomers love getting cool swag. And our t-shirts are very cool, as modeled by the sexiest team in banking.#36 – Wasted time with people who wanted to “integrate with CB Insights”We get a lot of inbound messages from folks who want to integrate our data into their products or who want to white-label our product. 98% of the time these have been giant wastes of time. Generally, I’ve found that people who propose convoluted business relationship structures often (1) don’t have money and (2) don’t know what they want or are doing.I know now to pre-qualify these quickly and move on.#37 – Have been too modest about our technologyThis one sounds like a humble brag I know. But hear me out:We take a lot of pride in making hard things look easy because I wrongly thought the customers didn’t care how the sausage was made. But I’ve learned that they do. I’ve seen companies drop marketing buzzwords around Machine Learning and Big Data into their pitch and watched customers really get excited about those things.So while we don’t lead with the buzzwords, we’ve started talking more about our data mining technology to get our financing and acquisition data or about the science behind our content marketing efforts.In addition, by not emphasizing our technology, we also were probably hurting our recruitment efforts.#38 – More proactive outreach to journalistsWe get a fair amount of press, but there are lots of interesting trends and insights about companies and investors we see pretty early. We should be proactively reaching out to the media with ideas, rather than waiting until they inquire.Product#39 – Took advice from non-customers (who would never be customers)Not all feedback is created equal. Feedback from existing customers or credible prospective customers is worth a lot. As is advice from people who’ve done something similar to us, i.e. entrepreneurs who built or scaled SaaS or data companies. But taking advice from folks outside of those camps has generally proven to be a waste of time.I think Mark Cuban’s thoughts on this are sound:Never take advice from someone who doesn’t have to live with the consequences.#40 – Chased fadsChasing the flavor-of-the-month has always proven to be a waste of time. Remember when gamification and badges were the shit? I thought people wanted badges and gamification, so we worked on that. Wow, was I wrong.I read a line that startups fail more often of indigestion than starvation. There have been times when I’ve been distracted by new opportunities which were not worthwhile or just too small to be interesting. Eventually, when we’re massive, we’ll target all of those. But when we were a team of 10 or 15 or even 25, we needed to pick our battles and avoid the distractions.#41 – Should have shipped a “rawer” productI’ve always been afraid of negative feedback. As a result, we spent too much time perfecting some key pieces of the product when we should have just shipped it. Reid Hoffman’s comment seems appropriate here:If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.#42 - Cared about competitors too much.In the past 4.5 years we’ve had several companies, big and small, enter our space. They’re always more well-funded than us and usually they’ve had a lot more fanfare. I used to get fixated on what they were doing, but over time, I’ve seen nearly all ultimately die. What I’ve realized in all of these instances is that my “fascination” with these startups is driven by ego.Money doesn’t buy execution. We’ve gotten this far by focusing on customers – the people who pay us. I’ve stupidly forgotten this at times.#43 – Product development driven by competitors – not customersI’ve made the mistake of fixating on what a competitor does and thought “oh, we should do that”. That has always gone poorly. Two things I’ve learned from these mishaps:1) When we’ve done stuff in response to competitors and not customers, it has never gone well. Customers pay us. I need to listen to them and remember the rest is noise.2) Our team has a much better view of where the market needs to go than our competitors. We should trust our instincts.Admin & Infrastructure#44 – Stayed in a crappy office too longWe started in 125 sq ft and I think there is a weird part of me that likes the austerity of living humbly, but this went too far.Before we moved recently, our last office for a time had 18 people in 900 sq ft. The smells from everyone’s lunch were enough to drive you crazy. Being in such close quarters made collaboration among the team impossible, not to mention it was definitely not a great first impression for new hires.#45 – Didn’t outsource payroll soon enoughI manually wrote checks and did the withholdings and filings on my own for way too long. What a pain in the ass. We’ve moved over to ZenPayroll which has been great.#46 – Didn’t fire bad advisors quicklyObvious sounding, but sometimes it’s harder to do than expected. Advisors of any kind (lawyers, accountants, PR, etc) often have a lot of knowledge about how things work and so when starting the business with one advisor, transitioning it to someone new may seem daunting.Because it is.What I’ve realized over time is that waiting to fire a bad advisor to avoid this transition pain is a bad idea. The problems that come from having a bad advisor pile up quickly and will cause you more headaches down the road than the short-term transition pain. Some of our goto advisors are mentioned here.Miscellaneous#47 – Dressed poorlyFor a long time, I literally had 1 blazer. So if I was going to buttoned-up event or doing a TV appearance, I was always rocking the same blazer. It was kind of absurd. I’ve since added a few more to my closet, but I suppose I should dress better to “look the part”. One day.#48 – Bought stuff from customersI did this a couple of times with the idea that we should support those that support us, and while it’s mostly worked fine, it does occasionally get messy when things don’t go well. In these instances, I should have done my diligence on them as a vendor as if they were not a customer and made my decision based on facts instead of just assuming they’d be a better vendor to us because of our pre-existing relationship with them.#49 – Got involved in sales to friendsI have friends who are in our target customer demographic and have made the mistake of becoming directly involved in the sales process. As a result, I’ve found it better to have someone else on the team sell these subscriptions as it depersonalizes things and forces smarter, more business-like decisions for both them and us.#50 – Responded to trolls on the internetAs satisfying as you might think it may be, I’m here to tell you that responding to trolls is just never worth it. I now keep in mind the following adage:I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.#51 – Our initial name was not very institutional friendlyWe started off with the name ChubbyBrain. Not an easy name to get Goldman Sachs to buy a subscription to. Only thing that might have been worse was this logo we considered for a bit.#52 – Wasted time “networking”I get emails from folks to have coffee semi-regularly. I wasted a fair amount of time on these in the name of “networking”. I now push to have an agenda & objectives for the meeting so that it’s clear there is a reason to meet. While there is perhaps some “serendipity” lost by doing this, I’ve found that conversations with people who have a clear reason to meet are more productive for both of us.#53 – Introduced people via the single opt-inI quickly wised up on this after realizing these types of introductions are evil. I now only introduce people with a double opt-in introduction email. Trust me on this one.#54 – Half-assed VC meetingsI took meetings with VCs who called us to talk about “how they can be helpful.” In the beginning, I thought when someone with money calls, you should take the conversation. The problem was that I wasn’t interested in raising money and as a result, I was not prepared for these meeting like I should have been. Unsurprisingly, I looked dumb and didn’t present CB Insights and our team the way they deserved.No matter how informal the conversation is, talking to investors requires putting on your game face. Not being into it, I shouldn’t have taken the conversation. It was a waste of time for both parties and took me away from what I needed to focus on – the product and our customers.If you’ve made it this far, congrats. We’re hiring and our onboarding doesn't suck anymore. It's actually pretty good I think.Many more screw-ups to come I’m sure, but hopefully I’m learning and making new mistakes, and I hope the team will keep me honest.