Author Archives: geoffbarrall

Don’t Engineer Anything You Can’t Sell

Posted on March 14, 2011 by geoffbarrall

In any startup resources are constrained. In a young product company and especially one that will be dependent on using others (the channel or distribution) to sell it’s product then these constraints are often most prominent in engineering and marketing. … Continue reading →

Posted in Company Culture, New Venture, Product Development, Testing | 1 Comment

A Lesson in Sales Management From Frank Slootman

Posted on November 8, 2010 by geoffbarrall

A common day for me at BlueArc would include at least two visits a day from members of our sales force. These visits would be accompanied by stories about how we could win the deals they were working on if … Continue reading →

Posted in Company Culture, Sales, Wacky Silicon Valley | 8 Comments

Writing A Presentation to Raise Venture Capital : The Overview

Posted on October 6, 2010 by geoffbarrall

The Overview This is the second in a series of posts on writing a presentation for raising venture capital. In this post I will cover the Overview section of a venture pitch (click here for a complete list of the … Continue reading →

Posted in New Venture, Presentations, The Pitch, Venture Capital | Leave a comment

Writing a Presentation to Raise Venture Capital
An Illustrated Example

Posted on September 23, 2010 by geoffbarrall

Many new ventures require large amounts of capital in order to reach profitability (but not all). Over the last ten years I’ve raised approximately $230M in venture capital for my own companies and helped many other founding teams (most recently Pancetera) with … Continue reading →

Posted in New Venture, Presentations, The Pitch, Venture Capital | Tagged | 1 Comment

Don’t Ask, Test

Posted on September 15, 2010 by geoffbarrall

It’s probably controversial to say but I’m not a huge fan of asking customers what products you should build to meet their needs. Truly disruptive products are based on the correlation of a multitude of points of customer pain and … Continue reading →

Posted in Product Development, Testing | 2 Comments

How to Make a Disruptive Product In Four Easy Steps… (well factors really)

Posted on August 26, 2010 by geoffbarrall

Over the last ten years I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved in the design and creation of many new and innovative products. Many of them have been really useful or novel technologies but in order to be a … Continue reading →

Posted in Company Culture, Four Factors, Product Development | Leave a comment