Entrepreneur Corner: Power VC roundtable and the role of luck in startups

Here’s the latest from Venturebeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.

Roundtable: VC legends give their best advice for founders and CEOs – OpenView Partners surveyed several venture capitalists, asking them to share the advice to they most often give to (and the mistakes they most often see from) the CEOs and founders in their portfolios. Hear thoughts from Phin Barnes, Brad Feld, Rob Go and Alex Taussig in this roundtable discussion.

5 skills entrepreneurs can learn from engineers – Engineers and entrepreneurs might seem to be widely different career paths, but Sasha Gurke, senior vice president & co-founder of Knovel (and a former engineer himself) says they’re really not dissimilar. He lists five traits the two professions have in common.

Note to CEO’s: Decisions come from you, not the board – It’s easy for CEOS to blame risky or unpopular decisions on the board of directors, but as early stage investor Brad Feld points out, the board ultimately only has the ability to make one decision: To keep or fire the CEO. And hiding behind the board shows poor leadership skills.

Luck – and other keys for surviving the startup phase – Getting a company into the startup phase is simple. Moving it beyond that is where things get challenging. Geoff Perlman, founder and CEO of Real Software, shares 5 tips he has learned in building that company to profitability over the past 15 years.

3 ways to become more likeable – A good product can take you a long way, but if your social skills are lacking, you’re going to have a hard time succeeding as a startup owner. Entrepreneur and author Guy Kawasaki lays out three ways to become more likeable in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture given at Stanford University.