Both Sides of the Table

JULY 27, 2014

I believe the middle isn’t being “gutted” but rather is being supplemented by “opportunity funds” and “growth funds” that sit side-by-side “core funds” allowing the firms to stay small and nimble while still being able to grab prorata rights of their best early-stage investments.

Valuation 309

Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Later Stage Non-Compete 309

SoCal CTO

MARCH 5, 2007

Common revenue streams are consulting, training, support, customization, upgraded versions for corporate applications, etc. Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -. User Interface Beyond the Web Site ► November (7) Negative Customer Acquisition Costs - Creative Sta.

Open Source 150

Open Source Business Model Technical Cofounder Southern California 150

OnlyOnce

OCTOBER 31, 2013

Fred Wilson has been a venture investor and director in Return Path since 2000, first with Flatiron Partners and then with Union Square Ventures. If you’re fortunate enough to have built a really strong early stage company, you will find yourself in the position of being able to pick from a number of potential venture investors.

Valuation 133

Valuation Term Sheet B2C Security 133

K9 Ventures

SEPTEMBER 8, 2015

What everyone can agree on, though, is that there are definitely more seed and early stage funds now than ever before, and more people willing to give money to young companies looking to make it big. We grew it to just under 20 people and were acquired at the height of the bubble in 2000. That’s what K9 does.

San Francisco 48

San Francisco Early Stage Portfolio Software Engineering 48

Version One Ventures

JULY 22, 2014

At the same time, funding opportunities have expanded for early-stage start-ups. While the top of the funnel has grown with all the angel and early-stage activity, the bottom of the funnel is still roughly the same size (about 10-20 billion dollar companies/year). But this boom landscape might change soon.

Finance 167

Finance Seed Money Bootstrapping Angel Investor 167

Agile VC

MAY 26, 2011

Silicon Valley is still emerging from the tech bubble and massive downturn of late 2000-2002. You can sometimes attract capital from farther away but typically harder to do at early stage. Mostly smartphones + restaurateurs attitude towards viewing the internet as a customer acquisition tool. link] dazhi chen.

Term Sheet 178

Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

500hats.com

AUGUST 2, 2012

While a flood of new VCs came into existence during the late 90’s internet boom, many had difficulty raising new funds after the crashes of 2000-2001 and 2008 , and as a result significantly fewer fund managers exist now compared to a decade ago. In the past ten years there have been several dramatic changes in venture capital.

Silicon Valley 74

Silicon Valley Early Stage Venture Capital Valuation 74

Austin Startup

AUGUST 20, 2017

Early stage startups have to survive one day at a time and are often presented with limited choices of the moment that enable them to continue. At early stages you probably don’t have an assembly line and can’t clearly define any particular job. Customers are choices made by your startup.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Software Review Cap Table Securities and Exchange Commission 48

VC Adventure

APRIL 2, 2020

Anecdotally I’ve heard that early stage valuations are already down 30-50%. It’s early and not clear where this will end up, but I’ll keep my eye on it and will report here what we’re seeing. Marketing expenses are lower and customer acquisition costs typically are reduced.

Valuation 118

Valuation Portfolio Database Early Stage 118

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 18, 2012

Singapore-based early-stage technology seed fund Golden Gate Ventures has announced investments into cloud-based inventory and sales management SaaS solutions provider TradeGecko , online grocer RedMart and mobile payment provider Coda Payments. This marks Golden Gate Ventures first investments since its founding in February this year.

Singapore 147

Singapore Asia China India 147

www.inc.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

Why Arizona Bay started taking stock from its customers instead of cash. Jumpstart was one of Grahams first clients; it signed on shortly after he founded Arizona Bay, in 2000. And his vendors ended up with nothing when his company, OpenAuto.com , went out of business, in 2000. LEADERSHIP & MANAGING. Leadership. Advertising.

Arizona 40

Arizona Equity Iowa Venture Capital 40

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 27, 2016

At the early stages of your business, I advise you to say “Yes” and then immediately hang up and figure out how to make it happen. Plus, we still have that customer to this day because we have grown with them. There will be a catch though — they will want you to change some things to accommodate them. Don’t Stop Looking Ahead.

New York City 124

New York City Massachusetts New York Early Stage 124

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

In 1998 there were around 850 VC funds and by 2000 there were 2,300. By 2000 the total LP commitments had mushroomed to more than $100 billion. Try charging customers for your product when you have 12 competitors giving the product away free finances by $20 million of VC. The Funding Problem. The Exit Problem.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 23, 2011

With the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, risk-averse investors wanted to invest in more than just a business plan – they wanted to see real customers and real revenue before they stumped up the money. “It forced us to get laser-focused and drive customer value and revenue as quickly as we could,&# he remembers.

Community 162

Community United States Colorado Social Media 162

Duct Tape Marketing

NOVEMBER 9, 2017

” And that turned into, at its culmination, the $2000 course kind of paradigm. John Jantsch: So do you advocate, especially somebody like you that has … Let’s say you were creating a new program, and you have a following, you have some customers. It’s about where the responsibility for outcomes lies.

Bandwidth 36

Bandwidth Cost Audience Video 36

Eric Friedman

FEBRUARY 3, 2016

I have been working with a number of early stage teams going through various stages of fundraising and using this diagram to help explain my thoughts on some of the questions they will come up against. There was also no hardware to make small videos at the same pace as the mid 2000’s. Are customers ready?

Technology 60

Technology Flash Early Stage Cofounder 60

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2010

We spent the first 45 minutes or so talking about industry trends (in this order): The history and background of True Ventures, one of my favorite early-stage VC’s (and the one with whom Om is a venture partner). Founded in 2000 in New Brunswick, NJ. The strategy of GigaOm and where they differentiate in the market.

Venture Capital 225

Venture Capital Non-Compete Vertical Europe 225

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2009

When you’re an early-stage startup that hasn’t raised any institutional money you end up doing almost every job function of the company yourself. This can often happen when there is a good product built but no real customer adoption yet. This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. This is what happened to me.

Founder 299

Founder Technical Review Startup Venture Capital 299

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

million and you’re an early stage business this is probably a fair deal. It is true that you should mostly concern yourself with your customers, building a great product and providing excellent service. mostly importantly they can gain a customer advantage through all of the above. They get the PR bump.

Pre-Money Valuation 303

Pre-Money Valuation Dilution Valuation PR 303

ReadWriteStart

APRIL 26, 2012

Bullpen is one of a growing number of early-stage funds - or, perhaps more accurately, "earlier-stage," since even his is no longer the first out of the gate. They all went away; they got rolled up in 1999 and 2000 into these too-big-to-fail banking operations," Davidson tells us. Brown & Sons, Montgomery Securities.

IPO 115

IPO Stock San Francisco Lean 115

Spencer Fry

APRIL 17, 2017

When I first started building Coach, I invested $30k of my own money to get a prototype working and acquire our first half dozen customers, but I (and the contract developer who I was working with) were spread too thin. It wasn’t enough at the end of 2015 to have a working prototype and a handful of customers to somehow take over the market.

Bootstrapping 63

Bootstrapping Cap Table Liquidation Preference Cofounder 63

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 25, 2013

But the larger funds usually have lower returns because they are often investing bigger dollars at later stages with less risk and therefore lower returns. As you can see in this Cambridge Associates data, early-stage investing beat later stage investing in returns in 70% of the past 30 years. It is changing.

LP 374

LP Later Stage IRR Term Sheet 374

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Within a year, by late 2000 / early 2001 consulting firms were firing people en masse. If you know what your customers need, deliver against that promise and provide a product or services that has economic value you’ll do well. Ameet said, “Don’t worry, we’ll be fine, just wait for the next downturn.&#.

Turkey 302

Turkey Differentiation IP Technical Review 302

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

A friend of mine is a serial entrepreneur and is running a high-profile, early stage company in NorCal. Coupled with my participating preferred from 1999 and 2000 I had more than $55 million of liquidation preferences. I believe this is wrong. Let me start with a couple of stories. He’s been at it since 2005.

Founder 329

Founder Liquidation Preference Term Sheet Participating Preferred 329

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2012

I raised money as an entrepreneur, like you, in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005 for two different companies. And trust me, if you’re early stage you DO want to meet Bryce. He’s awesome for early-stage entrepreneurs. Meet early. I’ve raised seed rounds and A-D rounds. Not so much.

Developer 366

Developer Silicon Valley PR Las Vegas 366

The Startup Toolkit

AUGUST 28, 2012

The best way I’ve found to do that is to find anchor customers at a certain price point who are so thrilled that they will always buy all the service you can give them. Every time you double your price, you change your customer segment. The easiest way to make more money is to increase your walkaway number.

Early Stage 39

Early Stage Lean Sales Partner 39

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc. Over the last 35 years venture capital has funded nimble new entrants (on a scale never imagined by Schumpeter ) who exist to exploit discontinuities in technology or customer behavior. However, no markets last forever.

Silicon Valley 164

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 164

Duct Tape Marketing

JANUARY 25, 2023

And as a business, you know, a lot of your audience is small business owners or solopreneurs or early stage, you know, entrepreneurs. So, so now you, by selling direct, they are a customer and you know absolutely who they are. Matt Briel (17:18): , the real thing here is what you alluded to is customer data.

Audience 88

Audience Revenue Distribution Differentiation 88

BeyondVC

JUNE 3, 2006

" If you get too locked into talking about a product, then your partner or customer gets stuck into thinking about who else does this and why are you different. Pre-2000, I would argue that the mix was all tech and vision with no focus on building a business.

Portfolio 60

Portfolio Early Stage Differentiation Revenue 60

Occam's Razor

MAY 2, 2017

The goal is for each company’s Google Data Studio to not look like a CDP (customized data puke), but to be a focused strategic dashboard with an emphasis on IABI. If your dashboards are CDPs (customized data pukes) do this every three months. Let your competition be lame and play by 2000 worldviews. If you want to play along.

Metrics 141

Metrics Acquisition eCommerce Analytics 141

SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

Productive Programming - Gabriel Weinberg , August 31, 2010 BIG disclaimer: I'm not formally trained in computer science (aside from two classes at MIT in 2000) and I haven't worked closely with that many programmers or teams (maybe 10 or so). Dec 26, 2009). figure it’s a good time to be introspective and consider my motivations. We declined.

Startup 191

Startup CTO Hire Cofounder Venture Capital 191

Austin Startup

MARCH 7, 2021

These are all potential customers and strategic partners for startups. Home to over 80 private- and public-sector tenant customers who directly employ about 12,000 people on the campus, activity from Port SA contributes over $5 billion annually to the regional economy. In 2000 or 2010, it made sense to build in San Francisco.

Texas 90

Texas San Antonio Houston Dallas 90

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

We raised a seed round of capital in 1999 and our first venture capital round was the first week of March 2000 (e.g. But this was early 2000 and our US competitors had already closed rounds North of $45 million. Dinners were consumed with customers or in hotels and often past 10pm. At least not externally.

Entrepreneur 308

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley San Diego Non-Compete 308

abovethecrowd.com

OCTOBER 1, 2013

Over 13 years ago, in March of 2000, I wrote a blog post titled “ The Most Powerful Internet Metric of All. ” No other metric so holistically captures as many critical aspects of a web site – user design, usability, performance, convenience, ad effectiveness, net promoter score, customer satisfaction – all in a single measurement.

Metrics 93

Metrics Conversion Internet Acquisition 93

Up and Running

JUNE 12, 2015

If you’re a CEO, you’re one of the only people who can get out there at a strategic level and really form some of those key relationships especially at an early stage. I would actually turn that on its head a little bit and say, “Think about what the customers are actually noticing.” Noah: Yeah.

Silicon Valley 60

Silicon Valley Management Startup Hiring 60

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Outsourcing is something a big company, with a known customer / problem (that has revenue & traction) does to save cost. Talk to your customers. The right people are potential customers – ask them if they have the problem. When it comes to early stage investing – it’s all gut. How do I stay motivated?

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Hunter Walker

NOVEMBER 12, 2015

They have an incredible early stage venture fund. My partner Satya and I had worked together at Google and always wanted to do so again and so when we had the opportunity to create Homebrew, it was really with the idea that we could be early stage partners of conviction, do a small number of deals each year.

Montana 48

Montana Early Stage Lean Partner 48