Launching Seed to Scale
I’m happy to announce the launch of Seed to Scale Advisors. My passion for advising sort of snuck up on me. Yes, I love technology, love the startup environment, and game playing out different scenarios. But advising sounded a lot like a job I hated with a passion….strategy consulting.
I joined a strategy consulting firm focused in the Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods industries right out of grad school. While my friends will tell you how much I love supermarkets, I hated my two years in that industry. The work involved lots of travel and chatting up potential and future clients. Not my forte. Some people dislike consulting because you don’t own the solution and follow through on execution with the client. But nothing bothered me more than the process we went through on the engagement. The senior partner sold the deal, got some insight on a likely conclusion that the client wanted, we wrote the main parts of the deck, and then we gathered the data to prove out the hypothesis. Of course, it didn’t always work out exactly that way. But in too many projects, it really did. Working to ensure that the data supported an opinion seemed an entirely backwards and counterproductive process to me. I loved questioning assumptions, going down all sorts of paths to find data, questioning the data’s relevancy, and then looking for insight in the data, if relevant. But I was a lowly analyst in the strategy consulting world. When I did object or question the data, I got reprimanded. It wasn’t long before I left to join a big tech company.
When I began advising, I worried I’d fall into the role of the consulting partners I’d observed. It would be easy to meet up with tech CEO’s, listen to what they had to say about what they hoped to find, give them some nuggets of insight, and then encourage them on their way. The truth is, I’ve seen advisors act that way. There will be more on that in future posts.
My Silicon Valley tech career began in earnest in 1998 when I joined Oracle. During 7 years at Oracle and the subsequent 7 in which I co-founded and then helped scale Coupa Software to a billion dollar company, I’ve talked with hundreds of tech companies and both formally and sometimes informally advised many of them. In the years since my strategy consulting days I’ve discovered what I do well, and where I can make the biggest and most authentic impact for the client. That’s why we have a very distinct focus and process with Seed to Scale Advisors. Seed to Scale helps B2B-focused tech startups go from early stage (think seed or early Series A) to scale — typically after their Series B round. We don’t do accelerator-type engagements lasting 3 to 4 months. Instead, we structure our work over two years where we have time to work collaboratively on key issues facing the startup during different stretches. As you can see on our website, the challenges range from truly understanding the customer, getting to product-market fit, pricing, fund raising and much more.
That’s enough for an initial post. If you are interested in learning more, I’d suggest we meet for coffee (another passion of mine). On our website, you can sign up for an intro meeting. No pressure, no cost. Just coffee in either Menlo Park or San Francisco.
Photo credit: Hello I’m Nik
