techguerilla talk

How to Find the Right Advisors for Your Startup

 

Mar 09, 2010 -

Building a company is not something that should be done alone; it's also something that shouldn't be done without guidance. While many entrepreneurs are busy finding the right co-founders and hiring the right employees for their team, first-time entrepreneurs often forget to put in effort to bring in great advisors and board members.

Having a strong advisory board and/or board of directors can provide immeasurable value to your startup; I think few would dispute that. The bigger trouble often comes in finding the right people that will fill the role of advisor.

Having your best buddy on the board will probably teach you nothing and do you no good. Having a technology luminary that never answers your calls is even worse. So how do you find the right people, and more importantly, how do you find people who will have passion for what you are doing?

My advice:

1. First dig into your current network and bring on someone you know and trust. Your mentors almost always make great advisors because they care about you and your success.

2. After you bring on mentors, reach! Build relationships with the people you really want to be your advisors. Network, chat with them, tell them that you want to pick their brains on entrepreneurship. You%u2019d be surprised how often people are willing to help.

3. Advisors aren't just for advice; they are also for connections and recognition. Mark Zuckerberg had a lot of leverage when he could say that Peter Thiel (Co-founder of PayPal) sat on Facebook's board during the early years. These are the types of people that get others interested and make key introductions that can push the company forward.

4. Diversify: bring on technology, business, media, venture capital, and other leaders so that you have a diverse array of advice and insight to rely upon.

5. Make sure to bring on people who will challenge you: many employees won't challenge your higher-level strategy, so it's often up to your board to give you a reality check.

6. Consider giving advisors a small piece of your company. Here%u2019s the reason: without equity, your advisors have no stake in your success. Unless they're emotionally invested in you, they have little incentive to return your calls, even if they're your advisors. Now with a small piece of the company (maybe of a percent), they are tied to the success of your company. In a way, it makes them employees that are there for you.

If you're still uncomfortable with the idea, another alternative is to bring in more people during an angel funding round bring in people who you want to be advisors and board members and convince them to invest, even a small amount, and give them equity in return. This is essentially what 37signals did to bring Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on board as an advisor.

7. Just ask. I sit on a few boards, and every time it was them who approached me. Don't wait for the right moment; just go for it. Again, you'll be surprised by who will say yes.

Tags: advisor, ben parr, mashable, startup

send to a friend http://bit.ly/bzHsgh" class="twitter" title="twitter" rel="How+to+Find+the+Right+Advisors+for+Your+Startup+%3a+Technology+%3a%3a+American+Express+OPEN+Forum" target="_blank">twitter facebook linkedin digg reddit

Print 6 2

Thanks to @habaneroweb for pointer to this. A short, concise, and spot on article.

click through to zubeta to see the full listing

"Ugh," you may sigh to yourself when you receive a colleague's request to fill out a 360-degree feedback instrument with 150 items. Of course you're lucky if you only get one; you may get a half dozen requests or more if other colleagues attend the same development program.

Feedback is best when provided as close to the moment of performance as possible, as shown in studies involving everyone from medical students to athletes. A Corporate Leadership Council performance management study found that frequent, fair and accurate informal feedback could impact individual performance by 39%.

But lengthy feedback forms discourage frequent and immediate responses. In addition, more and more employees work remotely, and may not have daily or even frequent interaction with their manager. Enabling employees to solicit feedback in short, immediate bursts may actually be more effective than performance reviews or lengthy feedback systems, since excessive feedback can be overwhelming and hinder performance.

Susan Hutt was an executive in a San Jose-based software company when she realized a few years ago that the workplace was undergoing a major shift. One challenge Hutt faced was the realization that their millennial-age employees (called the "trophy kids" by Ron Alsop) were starved for the type of attention they were used to receiving in school and at home. They expected immediate and contextual feedback, and wanted to use it to help them progress rapidly in their careers. Quarterly and annual reviews could not offer the immediacy and authenticity they needed. Many employees believed these reviews were just about making salary increase decisions, and not about evaluating the employee's performance. To alleviate this, Hutt added an on-demand microfeedback system. Here's how she explained it to us:

"Most of the younger millennial-age employees here use MSN Messenger because it's more immediate and short. They don't use email that much. Using technology, employees can get relevant feedback from a broad set of people fast. They can manage their own feedback and career."

The microfeedback tool enables employees to gather instantaneous peer feedback that, like Twitter, is limited to short responses. For example, one project manager at the company had an on-site meeting with a customer to wrap up an engagement from the prior year and plan for the next year. Afterwards, he sent around a request asking how he did on driving the conversation in 2009.

Hutt ran an all-hands meeting at the end of each quarter, and then sent out requests for feedback to five people. "Was it relevant," she might ask. "Did it cover the content you need?"

"People can be more honest and give you real feedback," Hutt said. "People have to think about their response because it's short. All the responses are organized so I can look back at it and see trend lines from the dashboard. That helps me to adjust my messaging over time."

Although Hutt used an online system that let them collect and trend more systematically, the same idea could be realized using Twitter. After conducting a presentation, for example, ask the audience to tweet you their feedback. Even in the midst of a client meeting, sending a tweet to a peer saying "Great job handling the tough question on release date," provides immediate, specific feedback while the memory is fresh, and they can look at the feedback later on their stream of tweets.

If you work with Millennials, the likelihood is high that they are going to be comfortable using Twitter. Some Internet traffic measurement services show Twitter users increasing 50% to 100% month over month. Twitter is on its way to becoming a mainstream tool for multiple generations %u2014 in fact, a survey by comScore found that 45-54 year olds are the top demographic group for using Twitter.

if you're a manager, you could ask employees to tweet you the answer to a question such as, "One thing I could be doing better to make it easier to do your job is ..." Using the @ symbol and your Twitter handle, employees can send you direct, meaningful feedback. Or you can ask a broader group what they think about the implementation of a change, such as a new expense-reporting tool, by using the hashtag approach to finding content on a subject.

Of course, as we wrote earlier, using social technologies requires openness. Are you ready to let anyone in the Twitterstream read the feedback your employees provide you? If not, a private microblogging tool for the enterprise such as Yammer, Rypple or Socialtext Signals may be the way to go at first.

Have you come up with clever ways to use Twitter or a private microblogging tool to provide immediate feedback? If you have, tell us about it!

Jeanne C Meister is an internationally recognized workplace-learning consultant dedicated to delivering competitive advantage, innovation and improved business results for organizations. Jeanne is the host of the blog newlearningplaybook.com. Karie Willyerd is the Chief Learning Officer of Sun Microsystems and has been the Chief Talent Officer or head of executive development for three other Fortune 500 firms. At Sun Microsystems, she has led the organization to win over 20 awards for innovation excellence in learning. Jeanne and Karie are the authors of the book The 2020 Workplace (forthcoming in Spring 2010).

I'm a lover of infographics, but this one just doesn't do it for me. You should instantly be able to grasp a infographics meaning and purpose without trying to analyze extraneous information for it to make sense.

Option # 2 of course is that I'm just incredibly dense and slow to process visual stimuli