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As CEO, I had a standing 30-minute meeting every Monday to greet and connect with new hires.

When we raised the first Foundry Group fund in 2007, we took over 100 first meetings. We told our story several hundred times. As part of it was a slide called 'Strategy.' I still repeat the elements of that slide regularly, a decade later, as our core strategy has not changed.

If you have people who are high-performing working for you, it's so easy to do your job. Otherwise, you can't even agree on the time of the meeting or who will bring the coffee.

Start-up teams are always in flux, so, like all start-ups, we're always talking to candidates for various key roles.

It is important to let every employee know where he or she stands throughout his or her time in your business; I would suggest every quarter of the fiscal year. By being honest and open with each team member and their performance, you create value in their efforts.

I don't really like meetings, I like recording and performing music. I need to set myself up for when the time does come that I need better distribution or just a bigger team behind me.

If you want to be more productive, then start at the start: get there on time. Whether it is a meeting, a flight, an appointment or a date, it's important to ensure you are there when you say you will be there. This may feel like an old-fashioned tip to give, but it has served me well for five decades in business.

Every day, you want to come in and contribute when your name is in the lineup.

You meet with a CEO or founder. You talk about sales, engineering, product management and give some ideas or suggestions. And the founder quickly understands that you really can help them both operationally and from a strategic standpoint.