Startup Culture – Fire Fast

January 17, 2013

Nothing is more damaging to a startup’s culture than a rotten apple. Therefore, the second item on our culture list is “Fire fast”, which is the complement to “Hire slow.” It’s harder than it sounds. To me, letting someone go is hard because: It could be an indicator of poor hiring processes It could be […]

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Startup Culture – Hire Slow

January 16, 2013

Today, I’ll kick off a detailed discussion of the Corporate Culture of AccelerEyes. No culture gets very far without attention to the people that join the company. So we start off our culture list with, “Hire Slow.” Note that this is not listed in the more grammatically correct form “Hire Slowly” because it has a […]

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Corporate Culture of AccelerEyes

January 15, 2013

At AccelerEyes, we try to create a culture that enriches the lives of those that work here.  Here are some of the things we try to live by (which I will discuss in future posts): Hire slow Fire fast Be upbeat Be focused Be consistent Be clear Be self-starting Be excellent Be selling Be better […]

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Earn Out vs Upfront Cash in an Acquisition

January 14, 2013

Recently, I met with 3 different entrepreneurs that each had been acquired for significant amounts. However, the structure of the acquisitions was very different in each case and led to drastically different end results. Here are the 3 general deal structures: 100% upfront cash, no long-term earn out 50% upfront cash, 50% earn out over […]

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Building a Machine

January 13, 2013

In the helter skelter early days of a startup, founders jump all over the place to cover a bunch of ground. There are all sorts of perceived opportunities, customer development conversations, and product development tasks that must receive attention. Associated with the frenzy is the adaptability that provides startups with a big competitive advantage relative […]

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Watch Out for Legal Fees Early On

January 12, 2013

The official start of a new company is a legal transaction, involving at a minimum the following elements: Registration with the State Registration with the City Formation of an Operating Agreement and potentially some other equity agreements Formation of Employee Covenants Agreement, also signed by the founders, which covers employee NDA, assignment of work product, […]

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Considerations for Student-founded Companies

January 11, 2013

At the time we started AccelerEyes, all the founders were PhD students at Georgia Tech. While our business was unrelated to our PhD research (which focused on computer vision algorithms), we wanted to be extra sure that there was no IP ownership ambiguity with the university. We took the following precautionary steps: Fully disclosed our […]

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Trade Show Story from the Early Days

January 10, 2013

In the early days of a startup, trade shows can be a large expense. There are a lot of things to discuss with respect to minimizing trade show costs, including most importantly not becoming a Conference Ho as Mark Suster describes. In this post, I share a fond memory of scrappiness at an early trade show […]

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Bootstrapping Startups through Contract Work

January 9, 2013

AccelerEyes is a bootstrapped startup, with revenues over $1 million and less than $10 million. When we founded the company in 2007, everyone was telling us to raise money or asking us if we’d raised money yet. It was unheard of that you could actually build a startup without equity financing. However, we looked at […]

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Bootstrapped Startup Approach to Buying Computers

January 8, 2013

In the early days of a startup, it is super critical to minimize expenses, especially on things that don’t directly generate new customers. Buying computers is one of the worst kinds of expense, because you have to pay upfront for a depreciable asset. Five years ago, AccelerEyes faced such a predicament. As a high-performance and […]

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