Entrepreneurship

Articles, publications, essays, and more

How Incentive Models Skew Behaviour

I have been on a bit of a kick about employee incentive plans lately, and observed an interesting trend earlier this year while we were looking to hire a CFO here at TandemLaunch Technologies. Based on the limited sample of a few dozen finance executives who I interviewed, it...

July 19, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship , People

Linearity and Employee Incentives Plans

In my last blog post I talked about the fundamentals of effective employee incentive plans: Proportionality, Transparency, Appropriateness, and Certainty. To my mind of thinking, creating linearity in your employee incentive plans is essential to achieve Transparency and Proportionality, and I’d like to elaborate on that a bit using the...

July 3, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship

How to Create Meaningful Employee Incentives

The purpose of incentive plans is to do exactly what the name implies – incentivise the people in your company (both executives and employees) to contribute more than they normally would. In other words, you want them to work harder, move faster, take on more ownership, and generally make...

June 26, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship , People

The CTO Role Broken Down

The CTO fills a critical role in a technology startup. The title is really broad, and people tend to cling to different aspects of it, but what do you really need your CTO to do in a startup? Here’s a quick breakdown for aspiring Chief Technology (or Technical) Officers....

May 22, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship

Perspective on Failure

A few weeks ago towards the end of an engineer’s interview she asked me a very interesting question, “Have you ever failed at anything?” That really got me to thinking. Looking back, if I were to describe my life I would say that I have been extremely fortunate. I...

April 3, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship

5 Rules for Cofounder Heaven

Finding a good cofounder is a key ingredient of a successful startup. Having had the opportunity to work with a variety of co-founders over the years, and now pairing up with individual co-founders for TandemLaunch portfolio investments, I have developed a couple rules of thumb for what to look...

March 27, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship , Tech Entrepreneurship

Career Advancement in a Startup Environment

Startups are an environment full of both opportunities and challenges for career advancement. The opportunities usually come in two distinct stages: founding and scaling. During the founding stage anybody can take any title and that’s often precisely what founders do. I have previously written about how this is generally...

March 14, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship , Tech Entrepreneurship

Ownership versus Leadership

Any organization should be continuously on the look-out for talented people who are capable of taking on leadership roles. In this context you hear the word ‘ownership’ a lot, in reference to ‘owning’ a function, project, or deliverable. The words are often used interchangeably but, I believe, have very...

February 14, 2012July 6, 2017

Entrepreneurship

Don’t Take your Foot off the Gas Pedal

This is a cautionary tale from my very first startup, SunnyBrook Technologies. The company was about 2 years old when we happily found ourselves in serious acquisition discussions with a European company. We were at a very advanced stage of the deal, with all of the key deal terms...

January 31, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship

How can a Startup sell its Products and Services to a Fortune 500 Company?

Are you a startup entrepreneur, have a great product, and want to sell it to the ‘big boys’? Selling to a Fortune 500 company is obviously not a walk in the park, but having one or more of them as your customers could be very rewarding and key to...

January 24, 2012July 5, 2017