CEO Blog

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

His thesis is that most businesses sell in the $10-30M range so it is best for angel investors to push for a sale at that point which can provide a great return for the angels and for the entrepreneurs rather than holding on, raising VC funds and trying for the big IPO or $100M+ sale. email jimestill at gmailWarning.

CEO 189

CEO Blog Blue Ocean Strategy Exit Strategy 189

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 20, 2018

As a reminder, the dot-com crash was preceded by the dot-com bubble, a five-year period from August 1995 (the Netscape IPO) to March 2000 when there was massive wave of experiments on the then-new internet, including in commerce, entertainment, nascent social media, and search. IPOs dried up. Then one day it was over. The result?

IPO 8

IPO First-mover Advantage Business Model Agility 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 24, 2015

Decisive actions are required to tackle the factors that prompted the spin-off in the first place, which in many cases are underperformance and/or a lack of strategic fit leading to chronic underinvestment in the development of the business.

Chemicals 8

Chemicals How To Kahneman Reputation 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 31, 2014

As Johnson had described it in much more depth in a Time cover story a few months before, what made Twitter so promising and interesting and important was “the fact that many of its core features and applications have been developed by people who are not on the Twitter payroll.” billion in its 2013 IPO) that investors have plowed into it.

Marketing 9

Marketing IPO Venture Capitalist Fashion 9

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 2, 2016

Originally intended to support advertising agencies, Facebook created a training and education platform to teach advertisers how to use Facebook’s myriad advertising, marketing and experimentation tools more effectively. After SAP opened a platform to develop, share, and track expertise everything changed. Think APIs and SDKs.

IPO 8

IPO Human Capital Insurance Business Model 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 9, 2018

Tom often hogs the spotlight in meetings unaware of how that alienates his peers. And…well…I don’t know how to put this, but he has noticeable body odor that’s a real turnoff.” Take Jim, a front-runner CFO candidate for a leading medical device manufacturer on the verge of an IPO.

Career 15

Career CFO Sample Execution 15

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 10, 2013

After all, China produces 600,000 engineering graduates each year, and as a former Google product manager I thought knew how to attract them. When I started recruiting talent for my new company, before candidates asked about our strategy, they asked how much money we had. They wanted to know what my plans were for IPO.

Engineering 9

Engineering IPO Real Estate Price 9

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 28, 2014

Instead of – or in addition to — differentiating on the what of your brand, use the why, who, and how. Dove showed how to break through in a commoditized category like bath soap with a compelling purpose, to celebrate every woman’s unique and real beauty. How – personality. Why — purpose and values.

Brand 10

Brand IPO Marketing Strategy Airlines 10

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 7, 2018

These ICOs are nearly always held when a project is at an immature stage of development akin to a seed stage startup — when it is testing hypotheses around its consumer value proposition and forming a founding team. This focused attention from developers has the added benefit of crowdsourcing feedback on the beta version of the project.

Cost 8

Cost Decentralization Finance Entrepreneur 8

Rajesh Setty

DECEMBER 4, 2008

Here you’ll find more than 1500 articles and mini-sagas on entrepreneurship, leadership, creativity and simply how to distinguish yourself. We had offshored our development team but when we did a rightshoring exercise, we found that a dual-shore approach works better. HELLO THERE AND WELCOME. You are a new visitor to this blog.

Blue Ocean Strategy 30

Blue Ocean Strategy CPM Licensing Open-book 30

Harvard Business Review

MAY 16, 2016

As if that weren’t tough enough, another challenge for corporate leaders is how to make sense of strategic alignment at both the team / business unit level (or division or department, however it is classified) and at the enterprise level. And yet it is possible.

Banking 14

Banking Strategy Film Operations 14

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 12, 2011

For HBR's April issue on failure, I penned a piece on the experience of going through a failed IPO. Second, for a book we're writing on the DNA of entrepreneurship, my co-authors Richard Harrington, Tsun-yan Hsieh, and I have developed a checklist on how to reflect on failure. but it was failure. First, welcome to the club.

Short-term 15

Short-term Long-term IPO Middle Management 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 24, 2013

I know how to find great people to hire. Indeed, many would-be entrepreneurs who are drawn by the romantic vision of developing a snazzy new app or product pooh-pooh selling as beneath their dignity. The sales process is just starting when the customer first says no. We have to keep moving forward. I don''t think so.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur IPO Open-book Marketing 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 7, 2016

” When a data breach happens, there is nothing worse than trying to figure out how to manage the crisis on the fly as it is still happening. Here’s a generalized scenario similar to cases we’ve experienced: A hot new mobile technology company lands one of the most successful IPOs of the year.

Planning 9

Planning Company Crisis Brand 9

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 10, 2011

Even at the expense of squelching prosperity in developed countries, turning today's stagnation into tomorrow's sheer misery? Should we tax and hamstring global capital flows, and possibly retard development, or free them — and let them fuel bubbles and crashes? Starvation or depression — which do you choose?

Globalization 15

Globalization IPO Decentralization Price 15

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 4, 2013

He polled his VC colleagues: "The odds of actually receiving funding from a cold email: 50,000 to 1," he writes in his book Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-up to IPO on Your Terms. "So You can develop your own criteria for whom to "let in the gate." The guy doesn't know anybody?

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist IPO Career Follow-up 8

Tim Milburn

MAY 8, 2014

” You can avoid the shock, and perhaps even prevent the setback from happening, if you develop the ability and the willingness to read the subtext beneath the surface. Even before the setback occurs, start thinking about how to deal with it from a position of strength. And do you remember Facebook’s disastrous IPO?

Gilbert 130

Gilbert Public Relations IPO Handbook 130

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 19, 2011

The news had just hit that Danny Lewin — the co-founder of Akamai Technologies, its charismatic CTO, a former commando in the Israeli Special Forces, and MIT mathematics genius who led the company from a math class to an IPO and a market cap of $30 billion — had suddenly died. They think.Danny.was.supposed to be.,"

CTO 9

CTO Lewin IPO Mentor 9

Harvard Business Review

MAY 30, 2013

He had developed an extensive plan, and had the promise of grant money behind him. It''s not about price, or code, or agile development. He is currently creating new businesses inside the Hearst Corporation, where he''s been driving the development of Manilla.com for almost 2 years.

Company 9

Company Ries Maturity Innovation 9

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 6, 2014

Sue Decker, Yahoo’s former president, describes how the deal came about and what Yahoo learned from doing business in China. billion — the world’s biggest internet offering since Google’s IPO in 2004. capital markets in what is estimated to be one of the largest IPOs ever.

Chief Financial Officer 10

Chief Financial Officer Operations Learning-by-Doing IPO 10

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 19, 2017

went public in June, then saw its stock price fall 70%, making it the worst performing IPO of a major company so far in 2017. For example, Blue Apron rose to become the largest meal kit delivery business in the U.S., Revenues were indeed growing rapidly, but only because Blue Apron’s marketing spend was growing even more rapidly.

IPO 8

IPO How To Metrics Bottom-up 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 21, 2016

But by the 1990s it had run aground: It hadn’t properly developed systems to implement its growth strategy internally, and so that strategy broke down at dozens of points of execution on the front line—with customers, crew, staff on the shore and the company’s travel agent partners. Codify best practices.

Company 10

Company IPO Price Loyalty 10

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 1, 2015

For many consumer tech companies, this post-IPO pressure on financial returns is too high. Because they are innovative by nature, consumer tech companies need to invest heavily in research and development, which could be done if they had a portfolio of products at different stages of maturity, with some of them being established cash cows.

IPO 8

IPO Company Maturity Short-term 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 6, 2017

The company started as a single store, but about a decade later it was a national chain on the heels of filing an IPO. When we have a lot of resources, there’s no need to get creative with how to use or maximize them. We haven’t developed skills in resourcefulness. His answer blew me away. “Say no!”

Creativity 8

Creativity Budgeting IPO Merchandising 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 10, 2015

Are Israeli companies on the verge of developing a repeatable playbook to scale their companies and become market leaders, not just acquisition fodder for the Silicon Valley giants? In 2014, for example, 18 IPOs raised a record-breaking $9.8 So how do Israeli ventures scale up? and the development team in Israel.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Entrepreneur Marketing IPO 8

Kevin Eikenberry

JANUARY 12, 2017

Dice was actually launched in 1990, initially as a bulletin board service for recruiters – and by the late 1990’s had ascended to prominence as the go-to site for finding software developers in Silicon Valley. Subsequent investment and growth would lead to an IPO in 1999. Careerbuilder hit the market in 1996.

Price 101

Price IPO Content Marketing 101