Research Commercialization Academy (BETA 0.01)

Angels know that the CEO is critical to the success of any startup company. ACEF asked Tom LeFevre, a twelve-year member of The Angels' Forum in Palo Alto, CA and co-founder of Intuit, to share his perspective on assessing startup CEOs.

ACEF: The Angels' Forum has invested in about a hundred startups over the last ten plus years. You've had a lot of experience with CEOs. What have you learned?

TL: We know that the CEO is the single most important person when we consider an investment in a startup. We've also learned that when Angels' Forum tried to talk about and assess CEOs, there was a problem in just having the discussion. CEOs are critical to a company's success and yet we had no good way to gauge in advance whether a CEO would be good or not. There wasn't a quantitative way to assess them, and when it came to qualitative measures, the words we were using didn't have a common meaning.

ACEF: How did you tackle this issue?

--- continued ---

http://www.angelcapitaleducation.org/newsletter-detail/114-id.209715312.html