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Lessons Learned: Hugh Molotsi

Startup Lessons Learned

When I left Intuit in 2015, I was VP of Innovation and led Intuit Labs, Intuit’s internal incubator. Through the great work of many other Intuit employees, Intuit Payments would eventually become a roughly $1B business for Intuit and a key enabling feature for over half of Intuit’s small business revenue.

Incubator 121
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How to Decrease the Odds That Your Startup Fails

Both Sides of the Table

It turns out that to build a successful company you ultimately need this strange thing called “revenue” that people don’t just hand you: You need to earn it. And there’s this other thing called “gross margin,” which shows the quality of your revenue. How much ad revenue does TripAdvisor make?

Startup 150
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Is This Startup Ready For Investment?

Steve Blank

Since 2005 startup accelerators have provided cohorts of startups with mentoring, pitch practice and product focus. Corporations running internal incubators face many of the same selection issues as startup investors, plus they must grapple with the issues of integrating new ideas into existing P&L-driven functions or business units.

Incubator 310
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30 Entrepreneurs Reveal Their Favorite Business or Entrepreneur Turnaround Story

Hearpreneur

The sales helped them raise $30K and the attention of a startup incubator, which offered them training and another $20K in funding. The company didn’t turn a profit until 2003, but by 2005 business was booming – Netflix was shipping out a million DVDs daily. Thanks to Jen Wan, Soteri Skin ! #5- Photo Credit: Raven Cobb.

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Keep It Under Your Hat: Valuation Caps and the $650 Million Sale of MySpace for $125 Million

Gust

Never missing an opportunity for a good war story, I’d like to revisit one high-profile transaction, the $650 million acquisition of MySpace by Fox Interactive Media in 2005, on which I spent many sleepless nights along with the rest of the deal team. The spin-out took a few months to negotiate and didn’t actually close until February 2005.

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It’s Morning in Venture Capital

Both Sides of the Table

This has led to the creation of incubators, accelerators and seed funds. In an over-funding environment companies are encouraged to eschew revenues in a land grab to acquire eyeballs, clicks, page views or whatever other vanity metrics give VCs the false comfort that they’re sitting on a gold mine. This never existed a decade ago.

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OATV Fund III

Bryce Dot VC

When we set out to raise our first fund in 2005, we began a nearly two year journey involving enormous amounts of educating the market on what a seed fund was and why we felt there was such a compelling opportunity to build a new firm solely focused on this breed of cash efficient startups that make our model work.