How Not To Screw Up The First Time Like I Did

January 18, 2011

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog covering the “5 Common Mistakes Rookie Founders, CEO’s and Managers Make” and it really struck a nerve with a lot of people. If you missed it, you can read about it here.

As usual I was doing my weekly reading when I came across a blog on TechCrunch by Mark Suster titled “How I Use Visualization To Drive Creativity“. I thoroughly enjoyed the article. You can check it out here if you want. Mark is a successful 2 time entrepreneur who sold his last company to Salesforce.com. Mark spent some time as Vice President of Product Management at Salesforce before he joined GRP Partners as an Investment Partner focusing on early stage technology companies.

I pulled out of the blog what I thought would really resonate with founders and or CEOs and management teams of early and expansion stage software companies. It was a presentation he gave at the January 2011 NextGen conference.

The presentation title was “How Not To Screw (I changed the original term he used to avoid offending the editorial police) Up The First Time Like I Did”. The presentation lists 16 lessons he learned as an entrepreneur. Everyone can learn from these lessons (including Venture Capital firms). The presentation’s final 2 slides contain a series of take aways you will appreciate as well.

Before I joined OpenView Partners where we invest growth capital in expansion stage software companies, I enjoyed 20 plus years of experience in software companies. As a successful Operational Executive, I highly recommend you take the 5 minutes to check it out here… How Not To Screw Up The First Time Like I Did. By the way I made a few of these mistakes myself.

If you like it as much as I did, make sure you share it with your friends.

All the best!

G

Venture Partner

<strong>George Roberts</strong> is a Venture Partner at OpenView. He enjoys partnering with companies and helping them achieve their goals through strategy, focus and operational execution. From 1990 to 2003, George spent 13 years at Oracle Corporation, most recently having served as Executive Vice President of North American Sales. While at Oracle, George was responsible for over $1 billion in revenue and more than 2,000 employees, reporting directly to the company’s CEO and Chairman, Larry Ellison.