Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

But over the years I realized his comment was actually an astute observation about the mental mindset of an entrepreneur, and therein lies the purpose of this post. In fact using uncertainty as your path is an advantage entrepreneurs share. You’re Hired, You’re Fired. I wore it as a badge of honor.

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Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 251

www.inc.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

Entrepreneur news from reporter Eric Markowitz. Employee Benefits. Internet and Online Business. Back in 1997, Randy Parker was staring at a blank whiteboard, wondering where hed find the money to hire the employees and consultants he needed to build his new product. "We Small Business Success | Mondays and Thursdays.

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Fractional CTO Equity Iowa Technical Cofounder 40

thebarefootvc

DECEMBER 16, 2011

What’s different this time around (as opposed to the tech bubble of the late 1990s) is the widespread use of technology, “digital natives” (millennials who grew up with the Internet and mobile phones) coming of age, and a cultural shift towards self-employment and risk taking (again, powered by stark economic realities).

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Technical Review India Mobile Hockey Stick 110

Cracking the Code

JUNE 24, 2021

But the Valley in 1999 was a new world of startups, venture capital, and stock options. 1999/2000 was the startup heyday, and I was in the hot space of telecoms – it all looked promising. Today, we’re a global leader in the carpooling category, but back then that was a pretty new thing in the consumer internet space.

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Global Europe France Cofounder 62

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 16, 2011

In 1999, there were 486 IPOs nationwide; just 10 years later, in 2009, there were only 63. Liquidity can help attract new employees and keep current ones happy. If you have been giving stock options, employees will want you to be a public company, to exercise their rights to buy the stock and sell it at a profit.

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IPO Social Media Media Exit Strategy 223

OnlyOnce

MAY 1, 2019

That inspired me to create a blog for entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is a special day in my entrepreneurial journey and in the life of the company that I started back in 1999 (last century!), Press release is here. But the company is unusual in many respects. One of those is longevity. Don’t let ego get in the way.

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Syndicate Syndication Affiliate Cofounder 48

OnlyOnce

MAY 1, 2019

That inspired me to create a blog for entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is a special day in my entrepreneurial journey and in the life of the company that I started back in 1999 (last century!), Press release is here. But the company is unusual in many respects. One of those is longevity. Don’t let ego get in the way.

Syndicate 48

Syndicate Syndication Affiliate Cofounder 48

Growthink Blog

OCTOBER 14, 2011

It was a sunny day in August 1999 (I remember that because I was living in Santa Monica, CA at the time and every day was sunny). back to August 1999. And all the employees had to park underneath the hotel. It was August 1999. One set of emails/phone calls was to Entrepreneur Magazine. Here's what really happened.

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Los Angeles PR California Business Plan 91

Ben's Blog

OCTOBER 8, 2013

If you are an entrepreneur, you have probably heard some crusty old CEO or investor say something like “cash is king.” I was a founder/CEO during the period when cash seemed more like a serf than a king in 1999 and 2000. Investors loved anything Internet and could not care less about profits. Kanye West, “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”.

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Cofounder Finance Internet Founder 78

Ben's Blog

OCTOBER 8, 2013

If you are an entrepreneur, you have probably heard some crusty old CEO or investor say something like “cash is king.” I was a founder/CEO during the period when cash seemed more like a serf than a king in 1999 and 2000. Investors loved anything Internet and could not care less about profits. Kanye West, “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”.

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Cofounder Internet Finance Founder 78

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 3, 2012

Facebook and Google would be obvious choices for this, but so much has been written about each of them and they represent such special business models, I worried that it would be both hard for entrepreneurs to relate and hard for me to develop new insights. Many people know Akamai as the purveyor of the Internet’s backbone.

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Distribution Lean Massachusetts Cofounder 49

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2010

Moving on … My second post was directed at employees. If you’ve done it for a long time then I usually advise hiring managers to hire you as contractors and not full-time employees. That is when no customers wanted to work with Internet startups because we as an industry had burned so many customers.

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Venture Capital Hiring Software Review Stock Options 285

Scalable Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2013

And now all of a sudden you have got this global market of all these early adopters that have smartphones connected to the Internet, and they can just pick up their things and run with them. So that’s the big, big, big change that’s happened. So that’s the big thing that’s starting to happen right now. Stick a fork in it.

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Software Review Startup Venture Capital Stock 22

online.wsj.com

JULY 11, 2012

The Wall Street Journal is phasing out support of the Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) browser. Internet Explorer. Andreessen Horowitz is telling entrepreneurs it prefers situations where the founders have controlling stakes, reckoning that theyll be better able to resist outside distraction and focus on making great products.

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Silicon Valley Founder Software Review Technical Review 42

Austin Startup

MAY 14, 2019

Dictionary.com defines coworking as “ an arrangement by which freelancers or employees working for various companies share an office or other workspace. “ People can pay for a membership to work from a shared workspace which often includes internet, coffee, desks, and other amenities. - Let’s dive in: - What is coworking?

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Austin Community Networking America 48

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 9, 2009 10 years of entrepreneurship I recently passed my ten-year anniversary of becoming an entrepreneur. In the summer of 1999, I started working on a startup from my college dorm. Id been on the internet since I was playing MUDs as a kid, but by 1999 I felt Id already missed the boat.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 26, 2022

He focuses on investments in fintech, the internet, and software. We think of it much more in terms of how many employees does the company have? Suppose you trace the history of Netflix, which we’ve invested in since 1999 and are still one of the largest shareholders. The theme of this episode is how to scale unicorns.

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Partner Cofounder Retention Acquisition 132

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

JUNE 19, 2010

I had a lot of fun learning what the internet could do for me. In fact, my first website I can’t show you, because I don’t think we have internet access, but I had a Geocities website in 1999 for a card game I used to play called Magic the Gathering. I don’t actually have any employees. Where am I today?

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Technical Review Software Review Prospectus Audience 90

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2012

There is all sorts of advice on the Internet about how to raise capital. I’ve raised in boom markets and when everybody thought the Internet was a fraud. I raised money as an entrepreneur, like you, in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005 for two different companies. You’ll never make a great entrepreneur.

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Developer Silicon Valley PR Las Vegas 366

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

TechCrunch Europe ran an article in November of last year that European startups need to work as hard as those in Silicon Valley and I echoed the sentiment in my post about the need for entrepreneurs to be maniacal about their businesses if one wants to work in the hyper competitive tech world. We were based in London.

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Entrepreneur Silicon Valley San Diego Non-Compete 308

abovethecrowd.com

APRIL 20, 2016

All Unicorn participants — founders, company employees, venture investors and their limited partners (LPs) — are seeing their fortunes put at risk from the very nature of the Unicorn phenomenon itself. The same thing happened to many Internet stocks. In 1999, record valuations coexisted with record IPOs and shareholder liquidity.

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IPO Term Sheet Silicon Valley Valuation 40

Scalable Startup

MAY 16, 2015

Each circle represents one of the fifty largest technology companies in the city, the size of each circle determined by the number of the company’s employees. The largest tech employer, according to SFBT, is Salesforce.com with 4,000 employees as of January 2014 (an increase of a thousand from one year earlier).

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San Francisco Silicon Valley California Oakland 20

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 30, 2010

My advice to entrepreneurs was and is “ when the hors d’oeuvres tray is being passed take two ” (e.g. So I agreed to offer my current thinking on the economy and what it portends for the VC industry & fund raising for entrepreneurs. While not 1999 all over again but I am observing first-hand the signs of funding frenzy.

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Entrepreneur Technical Review Balance Sheet Government 298

abovethecrowd.com

JUNE 2, 2021

This “gain” ($34B last year alone) is a result of a direct wealth-transfer to these individuals FROM the previous owners of the company — founders, executives, employees, and venture investors. The founders, the CEO, the CFO, the executives, the employees, and the venture investors. Party B: The investment banks. Interestingly, the 7.5X

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IPO Customer Matching Silicon Valley 82