As a startup CEO, you are in the business of building relationships: with employees, with customers, suppliers, and partners. But you are also building relationships with investors, coaches, and advisors who are helping you achieve your mission and goals. Oftentimes, founders fail to build these relationships because they lack a consistent rhythm of giving regular … Continue reading Company Updates: Lines, Not Dots

One of the hardest jobs of the founder/CEO of any startup is having enough cash to operate and pursue the dream you’ve committed to building. Raising capital is a topic that could mean a lot of different things depending on which stage of the startup you’re in.  In case you’re not familiar, scan over this … Continue reading How to Soft-Circle Investors & Close Your Investment Round

My friend Will Little interviewed me and Brian about how we built VendorHawk from the early days through acquisition. If you want to see the high points, Will did a nice summary of key points in the cliff notes below. Watch the recording on the Sachel post: https://satchel.works/@wclittle/ventures-episode-12 In this episode of Ventures we cover the full … Continue reading VendorHawk Story: Ventures Podcast

In the first post, we addressed what startups can learn from enterprise software companies, but in this post we’re focusing on what enterprises can learn from startups. There is a reason startups outexecute the good ole’ enterprise, but let’s find out why. Disclaimer: If decision and policy-makers are your enterprise are stuck in their ways … Continue reading Startups & Enterprises (2 of 2): Agility, Trust, and Innovation that Enterprises need.

Since the acquisition of VendorHawk last year, I have been taking mental notes of things I'm learning working at a large enterprise software company, ServiceNow. I'm writing these couple of posts in an attempt to bridge two worlds of startups and enterprises and show what each one can learn from the other. If you’re running … Continue reading Startups & Enterprises (1 of 2): Startups, how to build for and sell to enterprises

The following contains the Founder's Manifesto, our company Values and how my co-founders and I intended to use them as we operated our company, VendorHawk. I'm am deeply grateful to Brian Geihsler for contributing the core content of the founder's manifesto and for he and Ben Stephens for holding to it while we ran VendorHawk … Continue reading Founder’s Manifesto

Today is my seven year anniversary with my beautiful, God-fearing wife, Bethany. From our sovereign foundations in God-fearing families to our early days of meeting in east Texas (12 years ago), to our family of five, just 10 years after starting a relationship, the Lord has been very good to me in giving me Bethany … Continue reading Honoring Bethany: 7 Years of Marriage

This is the last blog in a 4-part series called Getting Acquired. I started by demystifying how to engage corporate development teams, then talked about how to get a competitive bidding war to get the highest offers and also how to get through diligence to an announcement. This last post is my somewhat early reflection … Continue reading Getting Acquired (4 of 4): Life Post-Acquisition

As I described in part one of this series, you shouldn’t just avoid talking with Corp Dev and product teams with potential partners or acquirers without considering the upsides of competitive intelligence, learning and building a stronger opinion of the players in the market. A good CEO must also be thoughtful about his/her optionality. Is … Continue reading Getting Acquired (2 of 4): Running a Competitive Bidding Process to Sell Your Startup