From Lean to Green
As a technologist with a great idea but no team, getting your startup off the ground requires careful decisions that can affect the growth of the company.
Five Steps to Building an Inside Sales Force
There are many things to consider when building a successful inside sales force. I talked to an expert in the field, Jason O’Hare, the VP of Sales at WordStream, to ask for the most important factors when creating a sales team. WordStream is a company that sells automated marketing software, and required a robust sales force to make it the successful company it is today. Jason gave these five recommendations as the steps to building a sales force for any company.
Advice for Startups: What to look for in your Lawyer
I recently had lunch with Patrick Mitchell, who is a lawyer at Cooley LLC and a friend to Sigma Prime. He has extensive experience with startups primarily in the tech sector. I asked Pat about hiring a lawyer, as if I were an entrepreneur and was out looking for a partner to help incorporate an idea into a business.
Hiring a Lawyer – The Legal Stuff:
When should a startup hire a lawyer? An entrepreneur with an idea should only begin to think about hiring a lawyer when they are serious about their company or idea – i.e., ready to go fulltime.
An IPO is a Restart, an Acquisition is an Ending
When it comes to an exit, there are differences between getting acquired and going public. While an attractive acquisition means payouts for the founders and employees, it can often be an endgame. Going public is more like restarting, just on an open stage. Being a public company means you’re in the public eye, you lose some of the freedoms a private company has. You’re expected to hit quarterly and annual targets, please the shareholders, and continue doing everything you did as a private company, just with less flexibility.
8 things any company should consider before an IPO
Going public is a huge deal. An IPO allows for a huge round of financing that will hopefully allow a company to continue to invest in growth and become profitable or even more profitable than it already is. But what should CEOs of startups and other private companies consider when thinking about eventually going public? Last week I sat down with Scott Dussault, CFO/COO at Nasuni who’s seen multiple IPOs firsthand, and I picked his brain on what it takes to go public. Here’s what I learned.
Is an IPO feasible?
Data Storage Revolution: Nasuni and Scott Dussault
After a two-hour drive in the wonderful traffic of the Greater Boston Area, I arrived at Nasuni to conduct my interview with the company’s CFO/COO and seasoned startup operator, Scott Dussault. Nasuni’s offices are located between an orthopedic rehab office and a daycare, the perfect location for any budding software company. As Scott joked in an email with me, you could not make this stuff up; such is life at a promising startup I’d soon learn.
Summer Intern Blog Series
Sigma Prime is kicking off a blog series authored by our talented summer interns. The series will aim to capture important elements of what makes startups and entrepreneurs successful, what the VC/startup ecosystem is like, and provide deeper insight into some of the exciting things going on in the Sigma Prime portfolio. Our first blogger, Neil, is attending Boston College as a rising junior at the Carroll School of Management (CSOM). Neil is looking forward to creating some entertaining posts, and he's looking forward to readers' feedback in the comments.
Importing Companies to Boston
One of our focus areas is finding great entrepreneurs in other geographies – often overseas – and ‘importing’ them to Boston. Innovation happens across the globe, and valuable technologies don’t lose their commercial viability at geopolitical boundaries. The majority of our investments are in B2B companies, and when a promising foreign startup begins getting traction in their local B2B market, it’s no surprise that they want to start fishing where the fish are.