The two decades from 1979 when pension funds fueled the expansion of venture capital to 2000 when the dot-com bubble burst were the Golden Age for entrepreneurs and venture capital firms. During the decade between 1991 and 2000, nearly 2000 venture backed companies went public. You will probably not survive the acquisition. MORE >>

Though this was 2000 , and all startup & VC blogs we've grown to love didn't exist yet, I did have mentors available. Since 2000, I've been doing and thinking about startups constantly. At the very least, you should know the whole history of your space--failures, acquisitions, IPOs, reasons for such, etc. There are cures. MORE >>

August 1995 – March 2000: The Dot.Com Bubble. Tech IPOs were a receding memory, and mergers and acquisitions became the only path to liquidity for startups. Startup exits in the next three years will include IPO’s as well as acquisitions. The payoff:  in this bubble, a startup can actively “engineer for an acquisition.” MORE >>

So here are the most common exit strategies and considerations these days for planning purposes: Merger & Acquisition (M&A). But since the Internet bubble burst in the year 2000, the IPO rate has declined every year until 2010, and is now at about 15%. If you startup is your dream, why would you want to think about an exit? MORE >>

To become profitable using a freemium business model, this simple equation must hold true: Lifetime value > Cost per acquisition + Cost of service (paying & free) Said in plain english, the lifetime value of your paying customers needs to be greater than the cost it took to acquire them, plus, the cost servicing all users (free or paying). MORE >>