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 any other conference I’ve...
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 ad-hoc meetings to discuss a particular issue. Team Leads/VPs We...
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 too much! I’m going into detail here because I believe...
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!
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. With that in mind, I wrote this article for my employees, investors, and...
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 time has formed me into a much different – almost...
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 short of insane. We’re ending the year with more than 50 people...
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 how they run their teams. As every company culture is unique, this wasn’t some boilerplate text taken off a...
“Our ancestors have invented, we can at least innovate” – Amit Kalantri When I first jotted down the idea for Contactually, I thought it was unique (otherwise I likely would not have bothered to capture it). As expected, I was wrong. We only found a couple then-active companies with any kind of meaningful feature overlap. However, as we started working more and more on the idea...
Customer development. A few weeks ago I was walking around DC Tech Day, looking at all the super early stage ventures, some little more than an idea. I normally vehemently shun pessimism, but I couldn’t help but think that the vast majority were dead from the beginning. I couldn’t think of anyone they could call a legitimate customer, and when probing them, the unicorn...