Business 101 for startups by Fred Wilson
Yesterday I went up to Harvard Business School and participated in a lunch and a class. My friend Jeff Bussgang arranged the trip and we were hosted by HBS Professor Tom Eisenmann. Jeff and I sat in front of Tom’s class Launching Technology Ventures and talked for almost 2 hours on topics like Lean Startup…
Last summer I wrote a post called What A CEO Does. It was a popular post and I’ve seen and heard people reference it frequently. In that post I suggested that the three things a CEO needs to do is set and communicate the overall vision, recruit and retain the best talent possible, and make sure the company never…
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A lot of the discussion about last week’s MBA Mondays post on Outsourcing was about the differences between outsourcing locally and outsourcing outside your home country. A popular term for the latter approach is offshoring.
The advent of modern electronic communications has allowed companies to efficiently source and manage labor all around the globe. This…
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This MBA Mondays topic was suggested by Aviah Laor, a regular member of this community.
I’ll start this post by describing outsourcing and explain why companies do it. Then I’ll talk about outsourcing in the context of startups.
Outsourcing is when a company hires another company to perform certain functions. Wikipedia defines it as “contracting to…
Last week’s MBA Mondays post on What A CEO Does was a huge hit. Matt Blumberg, who is one of the finest CEOs I’ve had the pleasure of working with, wrote a follow-up post on the topic for his blog. I asked him if I could run it as a…
Continue readingWhat A CEO Does (continued)
I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career.
I was working on a CEO search for one of our struggling portfolio comapnies. We had a bunch of them. I started in the…
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Last week’s MBA Mondays post about Bookings, Revenues, and Collections generated a number of comments and questions about sales commission plans. So I decided to ask my friend and AVC community member Jim Keenan to write a guest post on the topic. Jim’s blog, A Sales Guy, is a great read for those…
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A reader suggested this topic for MBA Mondays. It is a good one.
When a customer commits to spend money with your company, that is a “booking”. A booking is often tied to some form of contract between your company and the customer. The contract can be simple or very complicated. And some bookings do happen without…
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Last week I mentioned that sometimes I am at a loss for something to post about on MBA Mondays. Andrew Parker, who got his MBA at Union Square Ventures (largely self taught) from 2006 to 2010, suggested in the comments that I post about the differences between Enterprise Value and Market Value. It was…
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In the past couple weeks we’ve talked about some costs that don’t always appear on the income statement; opportunity costs and sunk costs. Today, I’d like to talk about some liabilities that don’t appear on the balance sheet. The technical term for them is “off balance sheet liabilities” and they are something to be very wary of…
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