Advice for Start-up CEOs
Thinking about starting a business? Check out these six pieces of advice as part of your planning:
1. 8 Mistakes to Avoid When Naming Your Business
“Naming a business is a lot like laying the cornerstone of a building. Once it’s in place, the entire foundation and structure is aligned to that original stone. If it’s off, even just a bit, the rest of the building is off, and the misalignment becomes amplified.”
- Phil Davis, Tungsten Branding
2. Does Your Start-Up Have the Right DNA?
“In 1997 I started a company with two professors from MIT in the emerging Internet healthcare field. We made a lot of mistakes, but probably the biggest mistake was made at inception. We did not have the right DNA in the company for what we were trying to accomplish.”
- Albert Wenger, Union Square Ventures
3. How LinkedIn’s founder got started
“Be diligent about failing fast so that you don’t spend five years doing something that’s just going to fail.”
- Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn
4. New “Plain Preferred” Term Sheet
“The average Series A investment costs $50,000 in legal fees to close. Meanwhile, the founders themselves are being squeezed with more and more terms that lock up exit value, creating a misalignment of incentives. The Plain Preferred term sheet aligns the investor and the entrepreneur incentives.”
- TheFunded Founder Institute
“Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful.”
- Evan Williams, Twitter
6. The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint
“A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”
- Guy Kawasaki
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