Zvi Band

Author: Zvi

  • Reference Checks

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    Christoph wrote a great post about the need for reference checks in a startup. I’m surprised to hear periodically about startups that make hires without doing reference checks. Or, when people that have completely bombed our reference checks get hired. Reference checks serve a few purposes for us: Verifies that this is a good candidate…

  • Galapagos

    Galapagos

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    There are ~90 ships that have access to the Galapagos. On recommendation and research, we went on the National Geographic Endeavor, one of the largest ships in the Galapagos. Highlight album available here. Day 0 Connected through Miami (what a dump of an airport) to Guayaqil, Ecuador. From the many Ecuadorians we would later meet,…

  • Affinity Groups

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    The best source of learning, advice, and vendors I’ve received is from other founders. Great investors know that their portfolio theory not only applies to returns, but to establishing internal knowledge-sharing among companies at different stages. I’ve been to portfolio conferences for a few different funds, and have gotten more value out of them than…

  • 1:1s

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    Michael Wolfe has a great article about 1:1s and the benefits they provide at a startup. I wasn’t familiar with this being an established concept when we were starting Contactually, but we started doing it, and it’s been pretty helpful. At the moment, I have a few different types of standing 1:1 meetings, outside of the…

  • Working with a Virtual Assistant

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    As part of my evolution as a leader, better managing my balance between individual contribution and delegation/leadership was necessary. At the same time, my schedule was only getting denser and inbox overflowing. So in August of 2014, I hired a VA – a virtual assistant. For privacy I won’t mention his name or embarrass him…

  • #BattleDecksDC

    #BattleDecksDC

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    DJ and I hosted the first BattleDecks event in DC. 20 presenters. 3 minutes each. The only hitch – they have no idea of the topic or the slides until the audience does. No prep time, just improv. It was awesome. Definitely will do that once a quarter!

  • Putting things in perspective

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    Being a founder of the company – especially the CEO – warrants a special ability to see the entire picture. This applies not just to having the foresight to see where the market is heading and gear the entire company towards that, but also the responsibility to look back and put past actions into perspective.…

  • Working with a Coach

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    From my limited experience, one of the bigger predictors of success or failure among early stage founders is acceptance that they might be wrong, knowing what they don’t know, and being open to improvement. When I think back to when I first graduated college – the mix of experiences, trials and tribulations, people, and of course…

  • 2014

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    2014 was a pretty exciting year for Contactually. There are a lot of qualitative and quantitative advances this year for Contactually. We started the year 15 employees strong, less than a million in annual recurring revenue, and a solid yet buggy product. The growth that the company has seen over 12 short months is nothing…

  • Working agreements

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    As our team has matured over the past year, we’ve started seeing how key strong team leads (e.g. VPs) are for us. And with me as the CEO, it was important for us to align ourselves around how they work with me – what I should expect of them, what they expect of me, and…