We Would Be Scary With Some Capital!

By Calvin McElroy, Guest Author Entrepreneurship in Canada is hard. I have spent over a decade leveraging skills, knowledge and relationships developed from a successful corporate career – while trying to master the art of starting and developing early stage companies. Although the job is challenging and gratifying, it seems a day doesn’t go by

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Axe The CEO!

By Gerry Langeler, Guest Author Here is a sure-fire bet: Gather a bunch of entrepreneurs to talk about venture capitalists, and before long the conversation will turn to the issue of control. “If we take VC money, the next thing you know, they’ll be in control, and we’ll be out on our collective ears.”  

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What does a CTO do?

by Lance Glasser, Guest Author What does a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) do in a high-tech company? It is the most ill-defined of the CxO jobs. The trick is figuring out what activities can make a difference and which are merely motions. We all have more things we don’t know about than things we do.

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Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 11)

In this final segment of our interview, we discuss some of the current business initiatives, as well as potential exit strategies. My thanks to HP for providing us with his insight to allow us all to benefit from his experience. I also sincerely hope that all the cleantech entrepreneurs and VCs out there would pay

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Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 10)

I continue my discussion with HP regarding management teams, and then begin to explore other challenges like incredibly long sales cycles of ERI’s business, which makes forecasting and cashflow management very complex. In fact, with 18-36 month sales cycles, it makes me wonder to what extent our VCs who are rushing to Cleantech would have

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Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 9)

Finding the right team to lead a company is very important, and perhaps an area where many entrepreneurs struggle as they cannot attract the right people, or delineate responsibilities clearly or effectively. HP has had the foresight to make difficult management changes as necessary to ensure the success of ERI.

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 8)

Coming from a strong finance background, here we see how HP and his partners make decisions from both the perspective of the investor and the entrepreneur. This makes for a very interesting study.

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 7)

We continue to explore the foundations of HP’s involvement in ERI. The company came close to going out of business many times in the last 13 years. Somehow, however, the guys who were writing the checks – including HP himself, kept writing those checks!