One of the side effects of being a founder is that you get a lot of unsolicited and solicited pitches from potential parts, employees, investors, suppliers, business service providers (mostly recruiters), and generally a lot of people interested in leveraging your corporate assets and taking your money (and time). Part of the growth process of our company is to assign someone to look these suitors over to make sure you find the diamond in the rough, and weed out the marginal or insane opportunities that can drain precious business time. Peter Rip, whose blog I read often has a great summary of the value of time for a start up: "It often feels like the scarcest resource in a startup is money. It is not. Time is scarcer. You can raise more money, but you cannot raise more time." So while a colleague and I sat in an unusually mind numbing preso of how a potential partner could use our sales team and customer base as a “co-marketing” opportunity I day dreamed about a device that...
From my Dad, who can fracture an "ism" with the best of them: "You can lead a horse to water but that is water under the bridge."