Both Sides of the Table

JULY 29, 2010

The A round was done in February 2000 (end of the bull market) and my B round was done in April 2001 (bear market). People buy companies for 3 primary reasons: 1) they want the management team / talent 2) they want the technology or 3) they want the market traction (revenue, customer base, profits, etc). Do it early.

Venture Capital 282

Venture Capital Term Sheet Valuation Stock Options 282

Ben's Blog

JUNE 18, 2011

If we are in a bubble, that is a bit of an odd commentary for a company that grew revenues 83% year-over-year and grew earnings 93% year-over-year. Firstly, the cost of running an internet application has fallen 100-fold. The cost of running that same application today in Amazon’s cloud costs about $1,500 per month.

Technical Review 76

Technical Review Software Review Valuation Internet 76

BeyondVC

JANUARY 3, 2019

Once again, we led each of these rounds at slide deck stage and helped land the first handful of customers to accelerate path to product market fit and their Series A rounds. This means more collaboration with the Fortune 500 and more go-to-market experience as our portfolio companies navigate their path to first customers.

Stealth 79

Stealth Advisory Board Cloud Virginia 79

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

Ah, but today’s Internet companies have real revenue! An obvious example is Google who may have gotten less market attention if there would have been 8 well-financed competitors during the 2001-2005 timeframe. customers who paid for services often get burned. I said that at the Founder Showcase, too. and profits!

Saudi Arabia 309

Saudi Arabia Valuation IPO Technical Review 309

Babbling VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

I am seriously babbling like everyone else did in 2001, 2008 and now again in 2011. Discuss costs and your runrate and set clear timelines for what you want to accomplish in the next 6 months, 15 months and 18 months. Make your customers happy, especially the ones generating the majority of your revenues.

Germany 76

Germany Stock IPO Valuation 76

Up and Running

DECEMBER 14, 2016

See Also: How and Why to Collect Customer Email Addresses. MailChimp is ideal for the startup and small business customer that needs to grow an email list with industry-leading tools and best practices. See Also: 13 Ways to Make Customers Desperately Want to Open Your Emails. Which one should you choose?

Email 60

Email Small Business Marketing Campaign 60

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

When a product is truly unique and demanded a retailer willingly promotes and sells it en masse in part because it does get margin on the good but also because it brings customers in the door who spend on other products. Ariel understood her customer?—?the So Why Does This Matter? the modern buyer of home products?—?better

Curation 296

Curation Los Angeles Differentiation Channel 296

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 14, 2015

But like many companies over the past five years it hired aggressively and probably had some degree of straying off of a core strategy and some amount of excess jobs relative to its current revenue forecasts and opportunities. What is your revenue growth rate and what does this imply about your number of months of capital remaining?

Burn Rate 150

Burn Rate San Francisco Private Equity LP 150

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. Startups needed millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product out the door to customers.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

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. You’re going out to acquire customers. The vast majority of their customer acquisition is word of mouth.

Partner 132

Partner Cofounder Retention Acquisition 132

Mucker Lab

DECEMBER 2, 2015

Most brilliant “Internet of Things” ideas are quicksand for capital unless you have the branding, vertical integration and customer lock-in that Apple achieved. For the first time, entrepreneurs could build consumer services AND distribute them at scale with almost no physical middle men and inventory costs.

Vertical 60

Vertical Widget Distribution China 60

YoungUpstarts

JULY 15, 2018

Knowing how to take ownership of your data is the first step to properly leveraging it to grow revenue and build your brand. Some platforms throttle the amount of bandwidth they’ll allow to customers that may want to leave their service, forcing a slow, painful migration that can run on for weeks or months.

Metadata 100

Metadata Management Bandwidth Software 100

Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 25, 2015

Imagine being an investor and being approached by a business SaaS company that has raised $5 million, has $100k / month of revenue, has been growing at about 5% per month, and is doing a $10 million round. Your revenue growth flattens out for a few quarters but you didn’t get ahead of the cost dynamic.

Finance 70

Finance Bootstrapping Acquisition Revenue 70

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

We were depending on investor funding, but with $60,000 in revenue no one would fund it. . I talked it over with some friends that night, and decided the next morning we’d have to cut all of our costs. . I went to a customer’s office and I watched him use my software. I was really fricking scared.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2010

Most of what I learned about operating startups I learned from the really tough years at my first company from 2001-2003. That is when no customers wanted to work with Internet startups because we as an industry had burned so many customers. I learned how to integrate customers into our product development process.

Venture Capital 285

Venture Capital Hiring Software Review Stock Options 285

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

We should end the year with a few million in fully recurring revenue and we’re projected to double next year. But more spend = more viral opps = more revenue down the road. >50% of our revenue in now viral. In my first company I had to raise money in April 2001 or die. Probably revenue based.

Founder 329

Founder Liquidation Preference Term Sheet Participating Preferred 329

Duct Tape Marketing

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

That was a huge revenue. Rita McGrath: The opportunity for getting close to customers revived again after Apple introduced the first iPod. We forget, we think this is ancient history, it was 2001, I mean it wasn’t that long ago. Well today you can be an Adobe customer for $7.99 Rita McGrath: Right.

eCommerce 58

eCommerce Norway Internet Advertising 58

BeyondVC

NOVEMBER 17, 2006

From April 2001 through June 30, 2006, we achieved 21 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. In fact, during the last 3 fiscal years for the company, it did $6.4mm, $10mm, and then $15mm in revenue. The trailing twelve month number is closer to $20mm in revenue. million, $0.9 million and $1.8

IPO 60

IPO Investment Bankers Demand Revenue 60

Software By Rob

OCTOBER 26, 2010

At the time (2001), digital cameras were very much maligned by “real photographers&# , and certainly by the general public. When everyone took notice of Java and abandoned C++ in droves, Rogue Wave’s revenues plummeted. They still saw their license revenue coming in, albeit a little lower each quarter.

Java 66

Java Product Software Developers Software Development 66

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 18, 2009

Customers are harder to sign than you want. You’ve got to accept customer losses as learning experiences and see how you can improve next time. The agreement was that both sets of investors would fund the combined entity, we would reduce overlapped costs and become a healthier company. In the morning I flew home.

Germany 298

Germany Entrepreneur Merger Los Angeles 298

Eric Friedman

AUGUST 18, 2021

The opportunity cost of the money I have not made on crypto is insane because I first was talking about crypto in 2011 as I’ve been in financial services for a long time. They talk about] businesses which are not contractually recurring revenue in the parlance of recurring revenue run rates. That scares me.

Silicon Valley 88

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Cofounder Africa 88

abovethecrowd.com

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Unfortunately, either information asymmetry or physical distances and the resulting distribution costs can both cut against the economic advantages that would otherwise arise for all. In November of this year, the company announced that it had achieved “substantially” more than $1B in revenue in the third quarter. annual GMV.

Internet 88

Internet Matching Vertical Hosting 88

Ben's Blog

MARCH 24, 2011

To find out whether or not today’s public technology companies have hit bubble valuations, let’s compare some companies that survived the great bubble with their bubble era valuations: The Enterprise Value-to-Revenue multiple (EV/Rev) and Price-to-Earnings multiple (PE) are commonly used metrics to tell the valuation:value story. Much better.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Venture Capital Valuation Database 78

BeyondVC

MARCH 23, 2004

There were a number of attendees who were here during the past few years and their businesses raised a fair amount of capital and somehow they managed to survive the nuclear winter during the 2001-2002 period. In other words, alot of these companies were based on cool technology and not on making customers happy.

Bankruptcy 60

Bankruptcy PR Revenue Advertising 60

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 3, 2016

No matter what type of business you have, document management software is a crucial piece to cost savings. By using a paperless management system, you can save on the cost of storage, printing, postage, labor, time, and more. Cost of Storage. This saves time and frees up your employees to do other revenue generating projects.

Software 159

Software Management Utah Security 159

Hearpreneur

AUGUST 19, 2015

2) Help Others & Improve Upon Customer Service. I started my business namely to help others and to improve upon the aloof customer service being presented in the IT industry. I heard horror stories about how their technicians had chips on their shoulders, belittling customers with their elitist attitudes. That’s it.

Entrepreneur 48

Entrepreneur Australia Technical Review Community 48

Mike Michalowicz

OCTOBER 19, 2015

An accounting firm based in Santa Monica, CA, specializing in bankruptcy, from 2001 to 2003. Previously, from 1999 to 2001, Seth was a Senior Revenue Accountant for the Veterinary Centers Of America. TSheets – The #1 customer rated time tracking solution! TSheets - The #1 customer rated time tracking solution!

Video 60

Video SEC Bankruptcy Wisconsin 60

om.co

FEBRUARY 5, 2013

I had been writing GigaOM (the blog) since December 2001, but in 2003, I started working on a piece for Business 2.0 called The Rise of a Insta-Company, which theorized that open source, cheap bandwidth and increasingly falling cost of infrastructure would result in companies being built at a dramatically lower cost than ever before.

Founder 80

Founder Conversion Distribution Silicon Valley 80

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 21, 2018

We knew that we wanted our new consulting firm to focused on improving customers top line revenue growth. At the time of its incorporation (2001), I had seen an article published by the University of Chicago showing that 82 % of CEOs had revenue growth as their #1 objective. Thanks to LaVon Koerner, Revenue Storm ! #5-

Naming 102

Naming Rhode Island Entrepreneur PR 102

Software By Rob

SEPTEMBER 1, 2011

No venue wants to be told that their product is worthless, and no customer wants to go see a show that’s unsellable,” said Robert Graff. In October of 2001, Webster, McCarthy, and Graff decided to do just that and GoldStar was born. Within a few months they had received positive feedback and around a 100 paying customers.

Bootstrapping 78

Bootstrapping Startup Cofounder Salary 78

Austin Startup

APRIL 23, 2020

Customers will need more than permission to return to restaurants and other businesses that were closed because of a virus they know is still circulating. After September 11th, 2001, people were afraid to fly. Customers complained about the added friction, but they accepted it as necessary?—?and It’s easy to scare people.

Austin 100

Austin Software Review Technical Review Viral 100

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 9, 2013

Case Study #2 MailChimp Gets A Friendlier Design – Increases customer base by 600% In A Year. See, Mailchimp had already been around since 2001 and it took them from 7 years to reach their first 10,000 customers. million customers total) in 2012. million customers total) in 2012. GetResponse (est.

Sales 126

Sales B2B Campaign Video 126

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 26, 2016

It costs up to one fifth of an employee’s annual salary to replace a team member when they go, so it certainly pays off to keep your staff on board for as long as possible. Despite being a bootstrapped company with little revenue, we over-invested in a central New York City office at a rate of 15% rent to revenue.

Software Review 100

Software Review New York City Salary Employee 100

ConversionXL

APRIL 12, 2012

A study on sex in the movies - that examined more than 900 films released between 2001 and 2005 - concluded that nudity and explicit sex scenes don’t translate to success for major motion pictures. Their annual revenue in 2010 was $2.5 Of course, these surveys were asking people how they would behave. People rarely know.

Advertising 118

Advertising San Francisco Florida PPC 118