Comments on Quick Pitch

By Robert Steven Kramarz">Robert Steven Kramarz | October, 7, 2011 | 0 comments

Congratulations to the winners and finalists of the Quick Pitch event last night produced by the San Diego Tech Coast Angels and hosted by Qualcomm.  Thanks specifically to Ron Dinocco for the massive job of getting the huge team of volunteers working together, and being an entertaining MC and sporting a brilliant red bow tie.  Thanks to Linda Wells for carrying out all the work behind the scenes – which was truely daunting.  How she does it all I’ll never know.  And thanks to Cub Parker for mentoring, for pulling all the sponsors together and for making sure the standards were kept as high as ever.

There were some really interesting comments made by some of the finalists after the event with respect to qualifiying for real funding. I want you to know what they said …

The judges were clear that having a great team was one key factor in their scoring of the pitches. Yet several of the finalists are operating their companies as lone cowboys without an execution master as CEO or COO. So I asked several of the finalists what is their plan to find that kind of CEO.  Here were some of the answers:

• I need money first to hire a CEO.  Shouldn’t I get funding first?
• I have an MBA so why do I need a business manager?
• I’ve started a successful compay before why do I need a business manager?  I can do it all myself.
• Can you angels help me find a CEO?

By now as a regular reader you may know the answers to some of these questions.  Let me throw in my two cents here:

1) Here’s the way winning innovators think:  The right kind of CEO is the kind who’ll work for a share of the company until you have significant revenue  or at least until you have enough funding to pay him or her. Even then, the right kind of CEO will work primarily for equity and relatively little pay.  The right kind of CEO really believes in you (as founder) and your vision.  This is the “right stuff” you really need, someone truely aligned with you and your investors.   The best candidate is someone who’ll PAY (i.e. invest in the company) for the opportunity to lead it to success. What a perfect win that would be for you.  Since I’ve seen this happen on many occasions (including myself investing in a company for the chance to lead it), I KNOW you can find such a co-dreamer.

2)  Does earning an MBA qualify you to run a young company with all its real-world challenges?  Think again.  Successful entrepreneurs partner up with another successful entrepreneur, one with at least one successful venture in their past and some failures as well to sharpen the saw.  Another possibility is to find a seasoned divisional manager of a larger firm in the same business sector – one who is tired of the corporate rat race and wants to jump into the entreprenerial rat race — someone who is tired of taking orders from a chain of corporate chieftens and wants to partner up with an unpredictable unconventional innovator instead.  — jumping from the fry pan into the fire but he wants it.  Either way, it’s prior experience in the pan or the fire, in a same or similar business domain, that you need as an execution master.

3) Even if they’ve run a company before, successful visionary founders realize that they think differently than managing leaders, even if they can do both jobs, they accept the fact they can’t do both jobs at the same time.  When a visionary leader wakes up in the morning, his mental focus is long term — improving the product, the technology and maybe the marketing — raising the company standards – or maybe taking the innovation a big step forward.  They think like Steve Jobs — every day is about vision and high standards.  He or she may also think about how to inspire the team and the outside world with the right story.  The managing leader (the execution master) wakes up each day thinking about how to get from point A to point B.  Instead of vision, he or she thinks about strategy and tactics.  Instead of product standards, he or she thinks about quality, incentives and getting the team coordinated.  Both ways of thinking are crucial.  Can you as innovator really do both exceptionally well at the same time?

4) Yes, angels and VC’s can find a CEO, but this is not a great idea.  Ideally, you want to partner up with someone you already know and who knows you.  Someone you trust. Someone who complements your leadership and personality style yet can work with you without excessive conflict — just a little creative stress. Successful company founders have a circle of managers they know and have worked with, to call upon to execute their visions.  Even very young (inexperienced) company founders have a circle of friends they can call upon.  Passion, energy, shared vision, and mutual trust can sometimes replace experience as qualifications for a managing leader.  It’s even better to ask an older mentor (adult supervision) who takes the ropes as exeuction master while the visionary founder focusses on perfecting the vision.  Most successful entrepreneurs I’ve met have at least one trusted and more experienced mentor in their past.

So this is what I got out of the Quick Pitch event last night.  I invite any comments (agree or not) and also anyone who wants some assistance in picking the right execution master can contact me personally.

 

Tags: angel investors, business manager, CEO, COO, Cub Parker, disruptive leader, execution master, Linda Wells, Managing Leader, Qualcomm, Quick Pitch, Ron Dinocco, San Diego, Steve Jobs, Tech Coast Angels, Venture capital funding, visionary leader