01Where are we going? 02Is everyone on board? 03Will it actually work?

Everything turns on these three questions. Most teams answer one or two and hope the third takes care of itself. It doesn’t.

What does your business look like from all three angles?

Let’s take a look

Founders

You’re looking for money, and all you’re getting is advice. I show you the blueprint of an investable startup and how to operate it, so you get the outcomes you’re actually after.

Investability review
Startup formation
Licensing & IP terms

Investors

You backed the company for a reason. Now you need to know it’s still heading there, that the team is holding together, and that the thing actually works. I help your companies solve for viability, feasibility, and desirability. No vanity metrics allowed.

Portfolio company advisory
Fractional COO Services

Executives

Every executive challenge is a change management challenge. Most leaders approach change in one dimension. Success comes from approaching it in three.

Authentic Leadership
Change Management
26+
Years in innovation management
$70M+
In collaborative R&D deals
Industries I’ve worked in
  • 01Startups
  • 02Cleantech
  • 03Biotech
  • 04Energy
  • 05Bioenergy
  • 06Software and computing
  • 07Telecom
  • 08Nanotech
  • 09Agriculture
  • 10Pharmaceutical
  • 11Medical devices
  • 12Robotics
  • 13Engineering and hardware
  • 14Security and defense
  • 15Entertainment
The Fixability Stack: executive, technical and marketing strategy are most fluid and easiest to fix; team is semi-pliable; founder motivation is rigid and hardest to fix.
About · Peter Schuerman

You might be in startup mode.

Steve Blank famously described a startup not as a company, but as a temporary organization searching for a business model that works.

It turns out most of us operate like startups more often than we’d like to admit. A new market, a new leader, a merger, a new initiative: any one of these sends an established organization back into search mode. The org chart says company. The reality says startup.

Every search comes down to three questions. Where are we going? Is everyone on board? Will it actually work? Most teams answer one or two and hope the third takes care of itself.

I’ve spent my career on those three questions. For roughly twenty years, at universities including Berkeley and Rice, I studied why smart teams fail to work together. What I found is that smart, confident people are the ones most likely to skip the search and jump straight to the answer. It’s a recipe for frustration at best, failure at worst.

What works is answering all three questions together, so that direction, people, and execution shape each other instead of competing.

Let me show you what I mean.

Schedule a call
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