The six major mistakes I usually see startup founders make when approaching investors are: Asking for a High Valuation Entrepreneurs invest a lot of money and time in building fancy financial models that produce a net present value based on future cash flows that are often unrealistic and too high. The valuation of a company is fundamentally based on forecasting future cash flows and the …

Innovation is all about creating the vision and should be concise, no longer than a few sentences or a paragraph. You want your entire team and organization to be able to quickly repeat it and, more importantly believe and execute on it. Leadership, is communicating the vision and its an essential means for focusing attention on what matters most. and …

April 2018 was a major milestone in the investment management industry in Greece with the launch of the Equifund (Fund of Funds). On the day, the European Investment Fund (EIF) officially presented the nine (9) investment funds selected: BigPi, Metavallon VC, Uni.fund, Velocity Partners, Marathon VC, Venture Friends II, Ellikonos 2 Sicar, EOS Capital, and Synergia Hellenic Fund. The nine …

Every New Year brings about new expectations, tons of excitement and last but not least the almighty New Year’s Resolutions. As a founder you need to build more confidence in yourself, have a more engaged and happier team and run a more successful company. So this New Year’s Resolutions are all about your own behaviors and habits and how these …

Numerous discussions over the last five years, with early stage startups founders and corporate innovation executives have driven the need to define and document a structured approach to deliver a solution to an existing customer problem either in an eight week acceleration programme or a three day ideation workshop or hackathon. Even though a one-size-fits-all-approach does not hold in any …

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to introduce the topic @S/W for Domain Experts 5 – Models before Code Conference in Athens and, this is a small write up from my notes. Lust a.k.a. Over-engineering Modern programming languages tend to add features as they mature, piling layer after layer of abstraction, with new keywords and structures designed to aid …

At the intersection of Business, Technology and CX a new breed of professionals is carving out their positions in startups, Technology Cos, Telcos, Manufacturing and even Big4 consulting firms. Here comes the infamous Product Manager, a rare breed of professional with a diversity of skills and experiences to the extent that each Company defines the role in their own unique …

The most important rule of thumb in product development is that, you need to talk to at least one customer per day so you can understand the problem you are fixing better and whether or not your product is the desired solution for the customer. There are three basic steps for gathering concrete customer feedback that can make a huge …

In the tech ecosystem the majority of the founders claim to be data driven and measure their Company’s KPI’s and even some publish them online. However, it’s not easy to select the KPI’s that are goal based and cover your company’s growth in the different stages of its life-cycle.  Each founder needs to explicitly answer the following three questions when …

Pricing is more of an art than a science for any early-stage B2B tech startup. Startup founders are in a situation where they can’t use known price points or analytics since there are none available from existing customer data, but they need to start testing their pricing hypothesis during their initial interactions with early customers. During these interactions startup founders …