Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

So if your costs are $500,000 per month and you have $350,000 per month in revenue then your net burn (500-350) is equal to $150,000. We want money to make some acquisitions (investors would prefer to fund M&A if they know specific deals – not to encourage bad behavior. We want a strong balance sheet (um, ok.

Burn Rate 383

Burn Rate Balance Sheet .Net Valuation 383

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 3, 2013

We spent a year (2012-2013) building a merchant acquisition machine and all of the systems to support bookings, calendar integrations, location services, etc. And today it was listed in the Best Apps of the Week by Apple. The team has put in a huge effort to get to this day – and I hope they’re sleeping well tonight.

Development Team Review 324

Development Team Review Los Angeles San Francisco Mobile 324

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2014

The more the supply of dollars spent in your channel the higher the cost-to-acquire new customers. Traders call this “arb” (arbitrage) and anyone who knows anything about arb knows that it only lasts for short periods of time until others discover the game and you must go in search of your next cost-effective channel.

Technical Review 384

Technical Review Hockey Stick SEM Channel 384

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 25, 2016

Lately I’ve been having to say things I thought I’d never have to remind people, like, “getting to positive gross margin in several territories is a very low bar to claim success” or “profitable excluding marketing costs” is not actually a real thing. But not doing basic research makes no sense.

Startup 150

Startup Seed Money DC Software Review 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 15, 2010

So when Google started pushing AdSense (ads for affiliate or 3rd party sites) they had a HUGE cost advantage. it seems that Twitter should have the same Google-like cost advantage. I think everybody heard about this acquisition. Google had huge destination traffic. Google monetized this with AdWords (ads on their home page).

Venture Capital 271

Venture Capital Affiliate Valuation San Francisco 271

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 8, 2014

He presented a system where your search results would be ranked based on companies bidding for placement and where merchants would be charged on a “cost per click” basis (CPC). What was Bill Gross’s heretical idea as portrayed to the tech elite?

Los Angeles 376

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Seattle 376

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

Equally, the streaming business has got to accelerate content acquisition, focus on customer retention, improve streaming technologies to make it better for users / worse for competitors, and they’ve got to continually improve the UI. this service will continue. No time soon. But eventually. It seems logical.

Los Angeles 329

Los Angeles Revenue Retention Acquisition 329

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 19, 2015

YouTube takes too high of a revenue split (45% vs. 30% that Apple and many other distribution companies take – FWIW, YouTube argues this is because their costs are much higher since they host and stream the video). This kind of spend happens all day long inside startup companies and 100% of the spend on attracting customers is a cost.

SEM 150

SEM Los Angeles Silicon Valley Acquisition 150

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2015

“the ecommerce company gained fauxmentum by raising artificially high amounts of venture capital and spent lavishly on customer acquisition despite long payback periods and questionable LTV” __. limit your fixed costs. In the ecommerce arena I see some great companies spending heavily on customer acquisition.

Balance Sheet 150

Balance Sheet eCommerce Venture Capital Acquisition 150

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 29, 2010

I talked also about 409a valuations and why common stock purchases cost less than preferred stock purchases. We covered the week’s M&A deals : Playdom and Kongregate and why Disney and GameStop made the acquisitions. The downside is that people need to buy their stock. Do it early. I talk about the company in the video.

Venture Capital 282

Venture Capital Term Sheet Valuation Stock Options 282

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 14, 2012

“it’s smart to use an impending investment valuation to drive a higher acquisition valuation” I would like to amend her statement slightly to read, “it’s smart to use an impending investment valuation to drive an higher acquisition.” Christin goes on. A nice play if you can make it.”

Valuation 316

Valuation Balance Sheet Dilution Term Sheet 316

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

The huge importance of this is that when you have a high-level of loyal customers you get repeat purchases that are significantly more profitable because you’re not spending new acquisition dollars acquiring them. If you’re in the market for pure functionality and you value the lowest costs, Amazon will always be a great bet.

Curation 296

Curation Los Angeles Differentiation Channel 296

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

If you hire 6 senior 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 6 months. COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you. After all, they doubled their operating costs when they weren’t even profitable.

Stock Options 227

Stock Options Startup Dilution Venture Capital 227

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 25, 2010

It is clearly a ploy by hotels to cut costs but it also benefits the environment. Anything requiring lead generation and/or customer acquisition I call Matt Coffin. We all want to think that we’re unique and original thinkers but we’re far more guided by others than we think.

Silicon Valley 293

Silicon Valley Technical Review Southern California Angel Investor 293

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2010

The importance of the conference is that it assembles most of the top privately held early-to-mid-stage technology companies in the country (and some globally) as well as most VC’s, growth equity funds and corporate development departments from large industry players looking at technology acquisitions. This is often in the 5-7% range.

IPO 242

IPO Venture Capital Private Placement Cofounder 242

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 20, 2014

They have production facilities in Mexico where they have been creating lower-cost video for traditional TV for many years and they pivoted this facility to producing for YouTube. So they began signing up Spanish-language content producers in Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and so forth.

South America 291

South America Colombia Mexico Vertical 291

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Example: We’re thinking about launching a new line of business Our current product only has 30% gross margin We could raise price, reduce costs or keep margin steady and sell more units If we raise price we worry about competition since we have competitors already below our price point We can reduce costs but it will take us 12 months to reduce the (..)

Stock Options 226

Stock Options Metrics Stock Valuation 226

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 21, 2010

By now we all know that the largest part of the online spend has been SEM (search engine marketing) where people buy CPC (cost per click) links to display alongside the “organic&# search results in the search engine. They are detail oriented, cost focused, quality obsessed and chasing a big market opportunity.

Advertising 284

Advertising Las Vegas Affiliate RSS 284

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 21, 2010

Knewton, Grockit and others are creating new ways for students to study for these tests in a more cost effective way. Leverage: with teachers not having to have in-person classes you can build a more cost-effective model and teaching can be targeted more to your individual needs. What I like? Big market. 2.2mm in Series A.

Venture Capital 265

Venture Capital Social Network Angel Investor Chad 265

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2015

These are hard things to initially comprehend until you see them in full force as local retailers get wiped out due to their albatross of high real estate costs leading to either higher prices to consumers or lower margins on their p&l statements. Thus Amazon’s market cap is $200 billion. And here’s the thing. ” Ha.

Technical Review 150

Technical Review San Diego Dallas Sacramento 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Cost – The biggest reason to give serious consideration to whether an MBA is necessary is the cost. They looked at total cost to the student and lost wages and then they plotted the incremental increases in salary that students who graduated got over the course of their careers. What you lose: 4.

NPV 337

NPV Chicago Balance Sheet Database 337

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

Rumored to have turned down acquisition offers from Yahoo and Facebook. Scott’s first big foray into industry-changing companies came with CarsDirect, an IdeaLab company where he was the initial founder & CEO. They raised around $350 million to try and sell cars direct over the Internet. Foursquare. -A Competitors: Gowalla.

San Francisco 248

San Francisco Venture Capital Analytics Government 248

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

Cloud computing and the open source movements have brought down the costs of starting a company by more than 90%. They need a combination of capital and experience to separate from the rest of the pack – the low cost of starting a business means it is even more vital to become the market leader more quickly.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 26, 2016

Even an extraordinary engineer or product lead who have built a breakthrough product aren’t guaranteed success unless they can get access to capital, get much needed press to drive low-cost customer acquisition and persuade fickle business leaders to join their company and help them shape their businesses beyond tech innovation.

Los Angeles 150

Los Angeles West Virginia Venture Capital Silicon Valley 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 12, 2018

In addition to the service where you can watch old videos being very compelling, the fact that Jamie has provided this service at such an affordable cost has been a large part of the appeal. When Jamie wanted to sign on Shaq as the company spokesperson it also cost money. link] What does this all mean for the future?

Security 247

Security Los Angeles Silicon Valley Video 247

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 3, 2016

Each VC has their own take on which services to provide and mostly they’re free but some smaller VCs charge portfolio companies for use of these services but usually at a cheap cost. Side Note : Upfront has hired Kerry Bennett as a member of our executive management team to run marketing – please follow her on Twitter here ].

Portfolio 150

Portfolio PR Partner Early Stage 150

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2010

It seems like M&A ebbs and flows through periods of rapid acquisition followed by years of divestitures. There weren’t enough details to know whether Corduro was trying to build a mobile payments company like Zong or a retail merchant processing solution like Square. That seems to be the case for lots of AOL / Yahoo!

IPO 236

IPO .Net Venture Capital Strategic Investors 236

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He took out an ad in the Yellow Pages (it was the early 80′s, pre Internet), which cost him $1,000 / month for a half-page ad. That gave Google a huge cost advantage. IdeaLab has created 75 companies, leading to 8 IPOs, 35 or so acquisitions and more than 5 companies worth in excess of $1 billion.

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 1, 2011

Quigo Lands Overture as Client, Rejects Their Acquisition Offer. Mike believed that any valuable page was going to be monetizable on a cost-per-click basis in relation to every page on the Internet. Lesson Learned From Rejecting Acquisition Offers. Rejecting a bona fide acquisition offer was an incredible learning experience.

Semantic 302

Semantic Acquisition Valuation Angel Investor 302

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

After a few acquisitions they offered many of the services you think about as foundations to social networks today. It did not have the same success as Google’s acquisition and MySpace sold Photobucket 2 years later to a relatively unknown Seattle-based startup called Ontela for a reportedly $60 million.

Social Network 318

Social Network Networking Internet Technical Review 318

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 13, 2011

When Facebook was opening up their platform, these guys thought that it was an interesting way to do user acquisition and preference acquisition of individuals and that they would be able find a way to monetize it in commerce-oriented verticals. And we also talked about what it’s like to work with Steve Case.

Cofounder 277

Cofounder Merger Founder Venture Capital 277

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

Creativity in our business lives – The average tech startup these days spends time talking with colleagues & investors about a multitude of things: customer acquisition, viral adoption, raising capital, hiring / firing employees, product features, technology trends, marketing / branding, and on and on. So I thought I would.

Technical Review 356

Technical Review Framework Audience Media 356

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 18, 2015

Or that marketing is simply about online customer acquisition. When you clicked it the app showed you how much Ubers would cost if De blasio’s car limitations came into effect and reduced competition.” He was a marketing genius. From very early on I observed the mastery that Travis Kalanick had of public marketing.

Employee 150

Employee Startup Canada Hawaii 150

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

We worked out a plan to merge our company with another European competitor, raise money from both sets of investors, cut the cost base and live to fight another day. Except that after the acquisition Salesforce.com required that I commute more than an hour each way from Palo Alto to San Francisco. I was on top of the world again.

Entrepreneur 308

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley San Diego Non-Compete 308

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 12, 2015

Twitter announced its acquisition of our competition Gnip almost a year ago. DataSift allows end-users to filter data before receiving it which allows customers to have more manageable datasets vs. an entire stream and it vastly reduces costs because customers don’t need to buy the entire data stream. Some evidence?

Syndicate 150

Syndicate Syndication Semantic Artificial Inteligence 150

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2011

Think of DataSift as turning the fire-hose into a cost-effective and manageable tap of running water. DataSift = platform for companies to develop cost-effective applications using this Twitter data to gain advantage relative to their competition. Or in utility speak, they are transmission and we are last-mile distribution.

Viral 307

Viral Las Vegas Tunisia Syndicate 307

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 9, 2019

With a standard tech startup I can tell you in my sleep that your two biggest cost items by a long shot are people (between 60–75% of total costs) and space (10–20% of total costs). The only other significant cost item that I see in some early-stage startups is inventory (for hardware or eCommerce companies).

Product 214

Product Software Review Technical Review Security 214