For our most recent StartupSac Happy Hour AMA we partnered with Founder Institute Sacramento to bring in Founder Institute alum and CEO of Bay Area startup Evolute, Kristopher Francisco. Kristopher has innovated cloud computing, big data and storage architectures amongst the world’s most admired technology companies (Apple) and the world’s largest technology challenges (Chevron), so he has a wealth of knowledge to share with entrepreneurs. Through 45 minutes of AMA, Kristopher fielded some great questions from the audience about entrepreneurship and running a startup. Here’s a sampling of some of the questions:
- Is your team more important than your vision
- How do you overcome the challenge of competing with big competitors
- How do you maintain culture and values in your startup
- How do you attract talented people in such a competitive market
- Thoughts on dividing equity
- Thoughts on first hires
- At what stage do you add advisors and how do you evaluate them
- How to go about securing clients and how to get the first client
- How much value do you put on having a dedicated office space
- Bringing on founders vs advisors
- Using a traditional business plan vs a lean startup model
- How to get press attention early on
- How far into design before filing patents
- What inspires you
