We help great founders evolve into highly effective CEOs.
We have one core belief at Focus.vc:
Technical founders make the best long-term CEOs if, and only if, they can learn the CEO skillset before those skills are required of them.
What then is the CEO skillset? It can be summarized in two core abilities:
1. Stay focused on the top priorities. And the best way to stay focused is to be held accountable. Boards often fail miserably in this role. CEO Coaches usually don't have the requisite experience. Only CEO Peer Groups are consistently able to hold you accountable to what they know is possible.
2. Build the processes that allow your team to produce. But how do you know what world-class processes look like when you've never seen them in action before? CEO Peer Groups allow you to see what is, and isn't, working for others.
So, we operate CEO Peer Groups. These groups provide interaction that is structured, thorough and meaningful. Each company displays their focus and processes. There is nowhere to hide. Weakpoints become clear. As does the path to strengthening them.
This is CEO school OF founders, BY founders and FOR founders.
Of course, a CEO Peer Group is only as good as the quality of its members. The better each member performs, the more accountable they can hold you. So, our job becomes simple.
We pick the highest potential CEOs, facilitate the meetings, and connect members to the information that is needed by all. That is all that we do at Focus.vc. All day. Every day.
Our groups are categorized by stage:
1. CEO Peer Group (Peninsula, San Francisco)
CEOs of high-growth companies funded by top-tier venture capital firms.
2. Founder Peer Group (Stanford)
We also work with especially promising idea- and seed-stage groups from Stanford University.
All of our groups are hyper-local. This facilitates out-of-group interaction, which multiplies the effectiveness of the group.
What does this mean? It means having regular meals with other group members which allow you to give and get even more in-depth feedback, on an even more timely basis than you get in the group meeting. It means being able to swing by and meet the world-class VP Sales that one of your peers has on her team, so that you now have a model to reach for when hiring your own VP Sales. It means being able to sit in on one of your peers' weekly Executive Meetings, so that you know how to structure your own. We could go on and on ...
If you are a venture/angel-backed founder, and want to realize your full potential as a CEO now, talk to a CEO we are working with. Ask if they find our groups useful!