Both Sides of the Table

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The Changing Venture Landscape

Both Sides of the Table

.” * I first wrote about the changes to the Venture Capital ecosystem 10 years ago and this still serves as a good primer of how we arrived at 2011, a decade on from the Web 1.0 The market today would barely be recognizable by a time traveler from 2011. dot-com bonanza. Ten years on much has changed.

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Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not?

Both Sides of the Table

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

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Why Startups Should Raise Money at the Top End of Normal

Both Sides of the Table

Then you can do a little bit of research and find out that very few companies ever achieve this valuation in a trade sale so you’re clearly gunning for an IPO. 2007, 2011) and for the hottest of companies and in bad markets for fund raising (2003, 2008) prices test the bottom end of the range. Here’s the problem.

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9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month

Both Sides of the Table

Those of us that are willing to admit that we fawked things up in the first dot-com explosion and learned from our mistakes have the battle wounds to make more pragmatic decisions in 2011. I had my sales teams telling me we needed certain features to be competitive. He didn’t feel my pressures on sales, marketing and ops.

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This Week in VC with Dana Settle of Greycroft Partners

Both Sides of the Table

The “private sale” market phenomenon was started in France by Vente-Privee (literally means “private sale”) and was replicated in Germany by BrandsforFriends. Gilt Group is currently the largest private sale web site in US. CEO hinted to WSJ that it may go public in early 2011. Time will tell.

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Master of Customer Acquisition, Matt Coffin, On Startups …

Both Sides of the Table

Matt was one of my inspirations behind Launchpad LA (yes, we’re going to have a program in 2011 – news very, very soon). o Everything is for sale but it’s the price that moves the timing. Don’t and you might make one catastrophic mistake that leaves you in the annals of Effed Companies.

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On Bubbles … And Why We’ll Be Just Fine

Both Sides of the Table

Huge structural under-employment in much of the country and full employment in some niche tech markets where it’s impossible to hire developers, designers or sales professionals. For others it feels like a two-speed economy, where rules apply to hot tech startups that don’t apply elsewhere. You know what I’m talking about.