John Seiffer

John Seiffer is a serial business owner, business coach, author, and angel investor. His own biography says he opened his first company, a waterbed store, in 1979, then built other businesses including a window-cleaning company and Video Rental Services, a venture started in 1991 that leased movie libraries to apartment complexes. He later ran that video business from 1,500 miles away and owned it for 25 years.

In 1994, Seiffer began coaching and consulting for business owners, focused on helping companies systemize operations so they can scale without constant owner involvement. He was part of the founding team of the International Coaching Federation, served as treasurer, and became president in 1998. His 2023 book, *Output Thinking: Scale Faster, Manage Better, Transform Your Company*, distills his operating-system approach for CEOs and business owners.

Seiffer’s angel-investing activity began in 2007, when he says he invested in a startup and became involved with the Angel Investor Forum. He later became president of the Angel Investor Forum in 2012; Otterpine’s author bio lists him as president in 2012 and 2013, and Crunchbase lists him as President & Board Member from January 2005 to November 2014. He was also an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for CTNext and has mentored startups through AlphaLab, The Refinery CT, Carnegie Mellon’s Project Olympus/Swartz Center ecosystem, and Founder Institute Pittsburgh.

• Seiffer’s own writing is unusually explicit that not every good company is a good venture investment: “I see a lot of really good companies that are lousy investments.”
• He argues that equity investors need companies capable of investor-scale returns, writing that a fundable model should be able to return “10 times their money in five to seven years, or three times their money in two to three years.”
• He favors companies where the business model supports scale, defensibility, and eventual exit: large markets, winner-take-most dynamics, protectable technology attractive to acquirers, or rapid growth into an underexploited market.
• Through Angel Investor Forum, the stated focus is early-stage U.S. companies at pre-seed or seed with product-market evidence, paying customers or identified initial customers, scalable activity, and a credible 5-7 year exit path.
• His mentoring focus is practical: Carnegie Mellon’s Project Olympus described his specialties as customer development, business-model definition and unit economics, and team interactions/responsibilities.
• His current operating lens is “Output Thinking”: systemizing a company by defining the outputs people produce, improving delegation, management, hiring, performance reviews, meetings, and remote operation.