T.A. McCann

Last week, I participated in The Meeting in Aspen, CO.  I was invited by my good friend Christopher Jerard who is former editor of Freeskier Magazine, Rival IQ customer and all-around good dude working with some amazing clients in action sports.  The event, held annually for the last 10 years,

Building your startup team is the most important thing you’ll do in the life of your company.  The team includes the people who work on it every day as well as your advisors, investors and in certain cases, partners.  At Rival IQ, we are hiring for a marketing leader

"Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity." -John F. Kennedy

I do a significant amount of startup mentoring and I’m often asked about fundraising. Like many things, I’ve tried to develop a process and decision-making criteria. There will always be exceptions to every rule and the odd startup that can raise a round without much preparation, but the

Today Oracle Team USA won the 34th Americas Cup, staging one of the biggest comebacks in sailing, and maybe sporting history, fighting their way back from an 8-1 deficit to win 9-8 in the best of 17.   It was an amazing success and show of skill, engineering excellence and perseverance,

In a startup, you are always racing against a clock. Most of the time this is “when are we going to need to raise more money” but can also be working toward key milestones or trying to outpace key competitors, which is often when you need to raise money. And,

First, happy valentines day to everyone and their partner, and a special one to my love, Teresa. It was 2 years ago to the day that we closed the deal and sold Gist to Blackberry (Research in Motion at the time).  As an entrepreneur and a team, we had set

I just finished reading Brad Feld’s latest book, Startup Communities. While I encourage every entrepreneur to read it, it is even more important for anyone who wants to make their city better, more fun and creative by driving a culture of entrepreneurship and startups. There are lots of great

Tomorrow is Demo Day at TechStars Seattle and the teams are readying their pitches for a group of prospective investors.   Following Demo Day, the pace of courting and closing investors will be super fast.  Here are 7 tips/actions I have been giving the teams to prepare for an effective

Going deep and engaging with customers is a critical part of start-up success.  I recently did a talk on this at the Founders Institute outlining the ways I like to do this and with many examples from our early days at Gist.  If you are developing a new business idea,