CEO Coach

Where to find capital is the number one question heard from founders at almost every stage of entrepreneurship. For that reason, Anne and gillian keep an eye on progress toward gender equity in venture funding and the numbers coming in for 2018 ain’t pretty!  TechCrunch reported in November that women led startups received 2.2 percent of funding. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that is the same number as 2017, reported then by PitchBook. No progress. This despite a decade or more of data indicating that diverse teams and women founders outperform the men-only ones, by large margins – by 63 percent more in a well-known report from First Round Capital. Fewer than 10 percent of VC decision makers are women. Fully 74 percent of US VC firms have no women investors -- stunning, considering the volume of voice around this subject this past year.  Anne and Gillian discuss what can and must be done to remedy this situation, and increase the flow of capital to diverse founder teams to improve outcomes across the board.

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Every entrepreneur dreams of selling the company and cashing out. It is almost a trope that founders need to have their exit in mind from the earliest days of their startup. While many are on a mission to solve a problem and make better ways to live and work together, the business of business is business, i.e. making money for the owners. If you have investors, they expect a return on the money they put in your company. Sure, they have gambled on a highly risky asset class, but they do so anticipating gains on their money. Gillian and Anne outline the basics every founder needs to know: when and how to prepare for sale, whom you need to engage for support, and how to find a buyer and pitch your startup.

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Gillian and Anne chat with Amy Margolis, founder of The Initiative and The Commune, an accelerator and coworking space for women launching cannabis businesses in Portland, Oregon. Noting the lack of women on boards or management teams in the emerging cannabis industry, she set out to provide women a comfortable work environment, business management coaching, and access to capital from a carefully curated set of investors, including institutional funding. Ms. Margolis has been an attorney for more than 17 years and is the founder of the Oregon Cannabis Association, one of the largest state cannabis trade groups in the United States.  She has been recognized Cannabis Business Executive(CBE) on their Political 100 and is recognized as one of the 50 Most Important Women in Cannabis. Elle Magazine refers to Amy as “Pot Power Woman” and Herb.co lists Amy as one of the 10 Most Influential Women in the Cannabis Industry.

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Anne and Gillian talk about different dimensions of financial models --  or more clearly, how to paint the best financial portrait of your startup -- you need more than one dimension. This is not a one-size fit all situation. In fact, financial modeling is like a Rubik’s Cube. You know, the puzzle that starts with four colors all jumbled on all four sides, which you have to sort so that each side is its own color. There are at least three different ways to look at your startups’ financial situation: current customers, potential renewals, and sales pipeline, A clear financial picture of a startup comprises at least three different approaches that should be expressed separately in different sets of books. The point is to have better information on which to base decisions. 

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Anne Gillian review the critical elements for your pitch decks, and the two most often included by novice founders that are unnecessary, and sometimes even counter productive. Too many times founders present their marketing message for customers instead of the information potential investors want to hear -- specifically, how will you make money for them? Or social change, if impact is their focus. Listen for step-by-step tips on how to build your deck for maximum effect.

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Marcia Zaruba O’Connor joins Anne and Gillian to talk about how startups can best approach hiring and benefits and how to build your staff and compensate them, when and what benefits to offer, and how startups need to think about planning protection from legal liabilities in staffing, especially in our current #metoo days. They look at what happens after a startup attracts the necessary talent, what can they do about compensation and benefits, especially, early stage startups that are pre-revenue and likely not yet funded. Listen for equal parts encouragement, hard truths and scary legal stuff in a wide-ranging conversation, including when and how to let new hires go.  Marcia is CEO of the O’Connor Group, staffing consultants based in the Philly area, who advise companies nationwide on how to create a recruiting and/or HR function or improve their processes, starting from company culture and core values.

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Gillian Anne chat with Eveline Buchatskiy, co founder of One Way Ventures, a fund for investing in startups by immigrants. What was the business opportunity she and her co-founder discovered? While managing Techstars in Boston, they noted their most successful investments were founded by immigrants. They decided to focus on the persona – the immigrant, especially  founders whose immigration experience is highly formative. The very fact that a person has left their home to immerse themselves into a new language, culture, and environment creates character. Dealing with a lot of ambiguity adds to character. You have no Plan B. You develop ability to cope with change, grit, determination, drive to succeed, and you work with limited resources in an optimized manner. You do a lot with very little — all positive things required for entrepreneurship.

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Now seems like a good time to address keeping your team motivated. Near the end of Q3 post-summer spirits may be flagging, especially if your company is progressing more slowly than you thought it would back in the enthusiasm of Q1. Gillian and Anne talk about how to revive employee motivation. You start the year with a plan, and sometimes the execution doesn’t go according to plan, or you discover your assumptions were off the mark. Or you hit a period of rapid growth, a mark of success for sure, but so unsettling for your team. What to do to keep your team motivated? On the bus? With the program? On track? Gillian and Anne have plenty of tips, with help from their friends at First Round Review, and researchers at Google.

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The National Bureau of Economic Research reports there’s “robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age.” Based on evidence from over 40,000 job applications, they also found that there is “considerably less” evidence of age discrimination against men.” Anne Gillian explore another discouraging trend  and take a look at whether that is true in tech, where the majority of employees are young and male, as well as whether the same can be said about startups. Is age the new ‘culture fit issue? With some surprising observations, they talk about how to deal with age discrimination, and why you want to.

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Blockchain is surely one of the hottest topics around these days, but how does such a tool help a startup build a better way to address life’s events among consumers? Gillian and Anne’s guest Alexis Williamson, co-founder of Life.cafe, explains how her team is using blockchain as a tool to fund their worldwide consumers’ life events, whether they have cryptocurrency available to them  or not. Life.cafe provides customers access to experts in their upcoming events, such as a wedding or buying a home, and then funds each plan using a time-honored system of ‘lending circles’. Blockchain allows efficiency in connecting and making resources available at the right moment. “A Loan from a bank is just money, says Ms. Williamson. We offer money plus expert guidance to accomplish each goal.”

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