Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

You’re unlikely to want to make this sort of investment with the product or the market not yet validated. As ever, prices still determined by: quality of team, quality of product / market and competitiveness of the deal. It was early 2000. The risk wouldn’t be appropriate. I raised my A round at a $31.5

Pre-Money Valuation 336

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Silicon Valley Stock 336

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 15, 2010

I don’t believe that search is the only answer in 2010 as it was in 2000. Golden rule of branding for me: 1) name your company or product your URL and 2) don’t paint yourself into a corner. &# Tweet&# = corner. Quirky - Platform facilitating collaborative design of consumer products through an online community.

Venture Capital 271

Venture Capital Affiliate Valuation San Francisco 271

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

I had previously raised VC in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005. There was no viral social networking products back then like Twitter where people could easily discover your content. We started building the product 18 months ago so we are in better shape than 99% of start-ups. Free product. I wasn’t feeling it. Folksonomy.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Term Sheet San Diego Viral 274

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2010

And so it happened that between 2000-2008 I was the biggest buzz kill at dinner parties. I believe that huge financial, productivity and technical gains come from new innovation rather than derivative thinking. But I’ll judge the angel class of 2009/2010 on a 7-10 year time horizon. We’ll re-compare notes then.

Florida 299

Florida Technical Review San Antonio Los Angeles 299

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

I know that most people who are close to them tend to deny their existence, as we saw in the great housing bubble of 2002-2007 and the dot com bubble of 1997-2000. In addition to FOMO it is partly driven by massive increase in valuations for earlier-stage companies who raised money at bit seed prices but who still have product risk.

Saudi Arabia 309

Saudi Arabia Valuation IPO Technical Review 309

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

Just ask anybody who was trying to close funding the fateful week of September 11, 2001 or even March 2000. The pricing problem – So an investor put $5 million at a $10 million pre-money valuation in a company with a great beta product but no real customers. It is no wonder why they had less time for new deals. Can a deal get done?

Burn Rate 263

Burn Rate Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Private Equity 263

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

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

The one major thing that Twitter doesn’t seem to have figured out quite yet is that platform thing or at least how to encourage a bunch of 3rd-party developers to build meaningful add-on products. In April of 2000 there were fears that the AOL / Time Warner merger would create a monopoly on the Internet.

Social Network 297

Social Network Networking Internet EC2 297

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 4, 2010

Let me start with Professor Christensen’s definition: “An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.&#. They offered a product that didn’t even try to compare with Siebel.

Vesting 376

Vesting Framework Revenue Technology 376

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2011

The truth is that in my experience very, very few people really enjoy the “pure&# startup environment: months with no salary, months with no live product and lots of trial, error & rejection. Mostly you read about fundings, product releases, big valuations, and M&A. of your product. Great new product release.

Entrepreneur 384

Entrepreneur Startup Salary Egypt 384

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2011

These two trends had a major impact on the computing industry from 2000-2005 but the effects weren’t yet felt by the VC industry. Platform cloud players like Salesforce.com provide compute resources so that third parties can build applications that integrate with its core product. These are very different.

Venture Capital 334

Venture Capital Software PHP Open Source 334

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 13, 2009

My Story: The public coming out for my first company, BuildOnline, was in early 2000. We had scrambled to get a product to market, built our first website, rapidly hired a technology team, raised our seed round of capital ($1.5 We started building 4 products so that our end-to-end, supply-chain services would be complete (MVP?

South Africa 310

South Africa Europe Poland Disintermediation 310

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2009

This can often happen when there is a good product built but no real customer adoption yet. million which closed the first week of March 2000 – a week before the market crashed. We built 4 products simultaneously with no market feedback. We had 6 developers, 1 head of product management, 1 QA in India and me.

Founder 299

Founder Technical Review Startup Venture Capital 299

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2010

An investment doesn’t guarantee your product will suddenly be on the investor’s price sheet. Software Helps companies rapidly convert unstructured online data and content into structured data assets that can be used to create new products, revenue Streams, and enhance current online data sets. 406 Ventures.

Venture Capital 225

Venture Capital Non-Compete Vertical Europe 225

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

When you see evidence that there is this so called “product / market fit&# then you may be ready for larger amounts of capital. I think many entrepreneurs under-estimate the benefit that capital early helps in being able to produce product and differentiate yourself in a nascent marketplace. They evolve the product faster.

Pre-Money Valuation 303

Pre-Money Valuation Dilution Valuation PR 303

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2010

But there are also problems / risks: - the funding environment might change dramatically – there may never be a next round (see: March 2000, September 11, 2001 and September 2008). - Google suddenly makes your product category free). - you may hit unexpected bumps in the road yourself making the next round tough.

Venture Capital 319

Venture Capital Startup Silicon Valley Warrant 319

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 25, 2013

In 2000 our industry had more than $100 billion in LP money. And I’ll know in 18 months whether we have product / market fit. VCs often don’t use the products of the companies in which they invest. I never understood investing in companies in which you didn’t really understand their products.

LP 374

LP Later Stage IRR Term Sheet 374

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 22, 2011

The truth is that in my experience very, very few people really enjoy the “pure&# startup environment: months with no salary, months with no live product and lots of trial, error & rejection. Mostly you read about fundings, product releases, big valuations, and M&A. of your product. Great new product release.

Entrepreneur 176

Entrepreneur Startup Salary Egypt 176

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 6, 2010

I was thumbing through Twitter messages on my Blackberry on Monday (I use Twitter as a “ mobile first, web second &# product) when I saw the following Tweet (see graphic). I freely admit this (along with nearly everything between 1999-2000) was a mistake. But I thought I should do a quick post on the topic.

Stock Options 294

Stock Options Stock Valuation Liquidation Preference 294

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Within a year, by late 2000 / early 2001 consulting firms were firing people en masse. Don’t be psyched out by your competitors big financing round, latest product release or business development deal. 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

JANUARY 16, 2012

I raised money as an entrepreneur, like you, in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005 for two different companies. As with any sales campaign you need to: Qualify your buyers early so you focus your scarce resources on people likely to buy your product. ” These are people with whom there is a likely match for your product or service.

Developer 366

Developer Silicon Valley PR Las Vegas 366

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 15, 2010

StackOverflow is a free Q&A site for software developers, blending functionality from wikis, blogs, forums, and social voting (similar to Digg/Reddit); 7.1mm unique visitors per month; new funds will be used to build out engineering team and build out product. Invidi is based in New York and founded in 2000. Primarily targets SMBs.

Stealth 285

Stealth SEC Advertising Accredited Investor 285

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 17, 2010

I was living in Europe in 2000 when the first WAP phones (Wireless Access Protocol) were introduced. But like lemmings, every company in the market rushed to proclaim they were launching WAP versions of their products. Before you let me have it let me say I am a FanBoy of Apple products. Absolute Power Corrupts, Absolutely.

Flash 326

Flash Mobile Application Development Cloud 326

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

The one major thing that Twitter doesn’t seem to have figured out quite yet is that platform thing or at least how to encourage a bunch of 3rd-party developers to build meaningful add-on products. 18 months ago 25% of all pitches to me were ideas for how to build products around Twitter’s API. Now I don’t get any.

Social Network 318

Social Network Networking Internet Technical Review 318

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

Coupled with my participating preferred from 1999 and 2000 I had more than $55 million of liquidation preferences. The company did well in 2006 as we delivered a phenomenal product that got much industry acclaim at conferences and with initial customers. In my first company I had to raise money in April 2001 or die.

Founder 329

Founder Liquidation Preference Term Sheet Participating Preferred 329

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. We had a $40 million round lined up to close in the Autumn of 2000. Our first big institutional round was $16.5

Entrepreneur 308

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley San Diego Non-Compete 308

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 9, 2013

But I had been down this road in 2000 and I saw how punishing markets could be when you didn’t sell and had an offer. But we’ve built a great product – we’ll find a way. In hindsight we know the market was sure there (whether or not we would have captured it is a different story). Don’t mentally spend it.

San Francisco 405

San Francisco Term Sheet Flash .Net 405

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 3, 2011

Even more interesting is that at GRP Partners (the VC firm where I’m a partner) our two most successful returns from our previous fund [which is ranked as the top performing fund in the country for its 2000 vintage according to Prequin] were both run by women! million in costs over 18 months to launch our products.

Entrepreneur 341

Entrepreneur Open Source Venture Capital Social Network 341

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 3, 2011

Your goal is to increase the top end of the funnel (more people using the free product) and increase the rate of conversion to paid. How did you determine the right price points for your product? They never did any PR or marketing to get their videos to first get shown on the news during the 2000 election.

Viral 303

Viral Investment Bankers Video Business Model 303

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

I also became more aware of the impact of food on my body overall after being diagnosed with acid reflux in 2000. If for some reason the meeting isn’t productive for me and I can’t see a way to make it more productive I simply begin taking notes for other tasks I need to complete.

Mobile 150

Mobile Partner Entrepreneur Startup 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 14, 2016

I’d like to explain as best I can my opinion on what is going on because most of what I hear from entrepreneurs is not only wrong but is reminiscent of what I heard in 1997-2000. The principle of microeconomics is that at a market-clearing price for any product the right amount of sellers and buyers will emerge and a price will be set.

Valuation 150

Valuation Down Round Startup Later Stage 150

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 12, 2010

New funding will be applied toward user acquisition and to expand into new product categories (gourmet food, wine and new services). Founded in January 2000 in Oakland by Tim Westergren; new CFO, Steve Cakebread was previously CFO of Salesforce.com. Metrics: 2.5mm members, 1,000 brands, 2,500 sale events to-date.

Venture Capital 217

Venture Capital Los Angeles Oakland Asia 217

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

Of course our great technology industry did itself rise on the back of infrastructure created by telecommunications & cable infrastructure as well as decades of media production. In essence users like you probably used many of these products without complete awareness that your computer became a node and was being used to transmit files.

Government 280

Government Distribution United States Stock 280