Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 10, 2016

As an entrepreneur mentor and startup investor, I see with sadness the 50 to 90 percent that fail. Just because you would have loved to have your groceries picked out and delivered, doesn’t mean the mainstream customer was ready for Webvan in 1999. But I’m not convinced that it’s as simple as that. Fail fast and pivot.

Business Model 120

Business Model Intellectual Property Startup Bankruptcy 120

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 9, 2015

As an entrepreneur mentor and startup investor, I see with sadness the 50 to 90 percent that fail. Just because you would have loved to have your groceries picked out and delivered, doesn’t mean the mainstream customer was ready for Webvan in 1999. business entrepreneur mistakes Scott Fearon startup' Fail fast and pivot.

Intellectual Property 120

Intellectual Property Startup Bankruptcy Viral 120

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 4, 2009

I often have career discussions with entrepreneurs – both young and more mature – whether they should join company “X&# or not. Let’s assume that the company raised it at a normal VC valuation, which means it gave up 33% of the company and thus $5 million / 33% = $15 million post-money valuation.

Stock Options 418

Stock Options Stock Liquidation Preference Option Pool 418

thebarefootvc

DECEMBER 16, 2011

Discovery, in contrast to search, took center stage as Pinterest displayed hockey stick growth (and raised VC money near a $200M valuation in late 2011). This will continue as more role models, mentors and capital are created from the resulting success stories, thereby creating more support for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Technical Review 110

Technical Review India Mobile Hockey Stick 110

This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 7, 2011

Every investor and entrepreneur knows there is something scary about the current startup economy. More entrepreneurs get to try out their ideas with smaller amounts of capital, but the bar remains the same to get to the bigger rounds. Valuations. Facebook is doing billions in revenues. LinkedIn has great revenue growth.

Angel Investor 104

Angel Investor Valuation Startup Revenue 104

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 26, 2022

So first, we were much more sort of with a high growth rate, and we did not even care about how we got the revenue when we got it. And now we are much more careful about revenue quality revenues. So the quality of growth has implications on the revenue stream’s sustainability. Would you say that? . David Zhang.

Partner 132

Partner Cofounder Retention Acquisition 132

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

The movie, “The Social Network” might have had more of an impact on creating future entrepreneurs than any other event of the past 5 years. Yes, it’s true that FOMO (fear of missing out) is driving some irrational behavior and valuations amongst uber competitive deals and well-financed VCs. Thank you, Aaron Sorkin!

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 25, 2010

A reminder that it is important for all entrepreneurs is to remember to be careful about “deal drift.” When I was raising money for my first company we had closed a seed round in 1999 and were working on our A round. We had many term sheets (it was 1999 and we had a pulse) and we were deciding which one to take.

Technical Review 301

Technical Review Term Sheet Due Diligence Venture Capital 301

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. billion in revenue, over $1 billion in gross profit and $500 million in EBITDA.

Distribution 49

Distribution Lean Massachusetts Cofounder 49

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 22, 2018

A single track conference with a maximum cap of 400 attendees offers an intimate, collaborative environment where founders and entrepreneurs can get to know one another. Founded in 1999, Etail was one of the first conferences devoted to e-commerce, and it remains one of the biggest. eTail East. Boston, USA.

Las Vegas 124

Las Vegas Software Review Affiliate Cofounder 124

abovethecrowd.com

APRIL 20, 2016

One key to this population growth has been the remarkable ease of the Unicorn fundraising process: Pick a new valuation well above your last one, put together a presentation deck, solicit offers, and watch the hundreds of million of dollars flow into your bank account. By January of 2016, that number had ballooned to 229.

IPO 40

IPO Term Sheet Silicon Valley Valuation 40

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 5, 2010

Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write and 9 Tips To Get Started - OnStartups , September 27, 2010 "The best part of blogging is the people you will meet"- Hugh MacLeod repeating wisdom from Loic Lemeur to me at the Big Pink at 2 am in South Beach after the Future of Web Apps 2008. Advisory Board. He's awesome. That crazy chicken.

Technology 191

Technology Product San Francisco CTO Hire 191

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 24, 2019

As I mentioned at the beginning of this series/ebook, over the years I’ve noticed that I tend to frequently share certain Lucky7 posts with entrepreneurs we’ve backed , team members at data.world, or other startup investors I know. So I’m packaging the best of them up for you here in a new series called The Entrepreneur’s Essentials.

Software Review 48

Software Review Sales Cofounder Analytics 48

Seeing Both Sides

SEPTEMBER 15, 2015

Only a handful of so-called unicorns — companies that have achieved a valuation of over $1 billion in the last 10 years — come from Israel, and only one Israeli firm, Teva, ranks in the world’s 500 largest companies by market capitalization. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Israeli startups are struggling to scale. We think so.

Cofounder 20

Cofounder Technical Review United States 20

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 9, 2011

Valuations were enormous relative to progress in companies. Companies with less than $2 million in revenue were asking for $50-60 million valuations and getting them. I spent my days meeting companies, figuring out what areas of the market interested me and trying to get a sense for how VCs thought about fair valuations.

Stock 305

Stock Technical Review Marketing Greece 305

Ben's Blog

MAY 24, 2021

Small” IPOs — companies with less than $50m in annual revenue at the time of IPO – have declined from more than 50% of all IPOs in the 1980-2000 timeframe to about 25% of IPOs from 2001-2016; Companies are staying private much longer — the median time to IPO from founding hovered around 6.5 1999-2000 51.6% 1999-2000 37.5%

SEC 36

SEC Accredited Investor IPO Technical Review 36

abovethecrowd.com

JUNE 2, 2021

The primary argument Chris is making is that Procore ended up at a better relative valuation (from his perspective) to its peers than did Squarespace, and that the clear reason this happened was the choice of an IPO (his preferred decision) over a Direct Listing (which he implies is a bad choice). Party A is locked up at time T+1.

IPO 82

IPO Customer Matching Silicon Valley 82

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

I believe the massive valuation increases in cryptocurrencies we’ve witnessed of late are not based on any fundamentals other than speculation and a drive for a quick profit by many who have gained from the market hype. Why would pouring hundreds of millions into even earlier stage startups with even less or no oversight be a good idea?

Government 280

Government Distribution Stock United States 280