Agile VC

APRIL 17, 2011

Kayak was started here in my backyard of Boston… co-founder & CTO Paul English and the product/engineering team is based here in Concord MA. Now that Google’s acquisition of ITA is closed, following lenghty FTC review, it would appear Kayak is poised to proceed with their IPO in the coming months. =.

Pre-Money Valuation 113

Pre-Money Valuation Liquidation Preference Dividend Common Stock 113

YoungUpstarts

MAY 14, 2018

Of course, these are important ingredients to growth, but the – perhaps unconventional – truth is that this kind of growth can be riskier and less compelling to investors than growth through acquisition. A desired deal is one that is engineered specifically with the big picture in mind. Structuring the Desired Deal.

Acquisition 124

Acquisition Finance Raleigh Mezzanine 124

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Blog About Log in Register Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit.

Acquisition 103

Acquisition Cost Customer Entrepreneur 103

David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

More and more startups are pursuing Revenue-Based VCs , but “RBI” doesn’t fit everyone. Flexible VC 101: Equity Meets Revenue Share. By tying payments to actual revenues, founders and investors remain aligned around the company’s real-time performance, good or bad. Flexible VC: Revenue -based. Of the Inc.

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 19, 2015

I usually envision a 50-50 ownership split for their efforts, but every engineer believes the technology side deserves the majority share. Thus it’s a waste of time for most entrepreneurs to be looking for investors until they have a product and some customer revenue. Most founders bootstrap product development.

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Intellectual Property Cofounder Bootstrapping 120

Duct Tape Marketing

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Since 2015, her company, Barney, has guided over 150 media, marketing & tech companies through acquisitions. 10:25] Are you seeing anybody selling parts of their companies rather than an entire acquisition? [11:19] All those things go into, you know, setting what that, that valuation is outside of just the financials.

Entrepreneur 79

Entrepreneur Technical Review Cofounder Valuation 79

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

ReadWriteStart

SEPTEMBER 10, 2010

They already have several customers including some telcos, and are at about $350,000 in revenues. Because customer financing equals revenue, not equity. Why not go further, develop more valuation, customer experience, and really, deeply validate the business? Her main questions were around customer acquisition and financing.

Cloud 115

Cloud Silicon Valley Incubator Finance 115

ReadWriteStart

MARCH 24, 2011

Additional work in figuring out the precise go-to-market consumer, academic institution, or enterprise - each is a different business), and consequent business model and pricing model will help enhance the company's valuation. His customer acquisition strategy, however, needs a lot of work. Photo by nazreth. Discuss.

Illinois 114

Illinois Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Chicago 114

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

ConversionXL

MAY 1, 2017

Reporting in the Harvard Business Review on a major study of growth stalls they conducted, Olson and his colleagues cite the case of the iconic brand Levi Strauss, which hit a historic high mark of sales in 1995, reaching revenue of $7 billion, but then, starting in 1996, saw a decline in sales so precipitous that by 2000, revenue was down to $4.6

Technical Review 127

Technical Review Algorithm Channel Analytics 127

VC Cafe

JULY 27, 2021

All camera-first applications and games that incorporate 3D content like Pokémon GO, Snapchat, and TikTok are seeing unprecedented adoption and revenue which points to the fact that new solutions are required to manage and deliver 3D content for all future applications.” From avatar technology, to game engines. Alon Grinshpoon, EchoAR.

Cofounder 183

Cofounder Mobile Revenue Cloud 183

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 5, 2018

by Walker Deibel , Managing Director of Centra and author of “ Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game “ If I asked you to name a business success story, what would you think of? Lately, we’ve seen startups able to reach a billion-dollar valuation, so-called “unicorn” companies, in the limelight.

Startup 182

Startup Acquisition Portfolio Venture Capital 182

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” __. I’m not saying you shouldn’t grow engineering or do PR. But as with any sales advice, revenue diversity matters.

Balance Sheet 150

Balance Sheet eCommerce Venture Capital Acquisition 150

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 27, 2011

And, oh by the way, we also really like the idea of the 1M/1M entrepreneurs building valuation and negotiating leverage through these business development efforts, instead of signing off large chunks of their company in form of equity early on. million in revenue. Brainscape. The answer to the question is neither.

Dilution 114

Dilution Revenue Finance Entrepreneur 114

Rob Go

DECEMBER 28, 2011

61M in Q3 revenue, up 28% YoY. Ebay’s third largest acquisition in the last 3 years. The company is expected to do around $500M in revenue in 2011 and has seen 50%+ growth YoY the past two years. Tripadvisor: An amazing entrepreneurial story. Spun out of Expedia and listed on the NASDAQ at a $3.5B market cap.

Technical Review 54

Technical Review Boston Software Review IPO 54

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. The vast majority of their customer acquisition is word of mouth. Would you say that? . David Zhang. David Zhang.

Partner 132

Partner Cofounder Retention Acquisition 132

ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 31, 2013

Snapchat may be a company with no revenue and an unrealistic valuation, but it is changing the way people think of messaging. Snapchat made waves earlier this year when the company reportedly rebuffed a $3 billion acquisition attempt from Facebook and $4 billion from Google. Or it could be the next Facebook. Time will tell.

Startup 60

Startup Cofounder San Francisco Software Review 60

Eric Friedman

JANUARY 24, 2020

Just take the recent acquisition of Plaid by Visa. A real business, with real customers, real revenue and a flywheel that makes sense to the fintech innovation ecosystem. There are brilliant teams working on complex problems, generating huge amounts of usage or revenue, that need your help. The Place.

Elevator Pitch 135

Elevator Pitch Valuation Revenue Early Stage 135

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 23, 2021

For example, if you haven’t achieved product-market fit, instrumenting every aspect of customer acquisition is overkill. I’ve seen entrepreneurs make the mistake of focusing all their efforts on customer acquisition when they also needed to fix a leaky funnel or customer churn. Just track metrics that help you improve the product.

Venture Capital 46

Venture Capital Metrics Investment Bankers Framework 46

K9 Ventures

APRIL 9, 2014

The low supply and high demand is driving up the valuations and deal sizes. Threshold for an IPO is higher Ten years ago, if you had $20M in revenue you were ready to go public. If you have <$100M in revenue, you’re probably going to stay private. Top engineering talent today has a bimodal distribution.

Mezzanine 134

Mezzanine Seed Stage Early Stage IPO 134

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

— Unremarked and unheralded, the balance of power between startup CEOs and their investors has radically changed: IPOs/M&A without a profit (or at times revenue) have become the norm. Typically, this caliber of bankers wouldn’t talk to you unless your company had five profitable quarters of increasing revenue.

Founder 252

Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 252

Eric Friedman

JUNE 11, 2019

Partnership Forcing Functions can be tricky because they typically don’t involve revenue, which drives most business decisions, but there are other reasons to do the deal. This keeps the firm and final answer on investing nebulous and entrepreneurs moving the firm in their tracking sheet or CRM around for no reason.

Term Sheet 68

Term Sheet Stock Options Early Stage Agile 68

ReadWriteStart

MARCH 3, 2011

Then Greg Snead, also from Tacoma, discussed Orbiter , an RFID venture that is moving along quite nicely, having clocked more than $700,000 in revenue last year. At this point, Greg is in the process of bringing in two additional investors, and the primary topics of our discussion were valuation and ROI issues around the new investors.

San Jose 115

San Jose Entrepreneur United States Washington 115

K9 Ventures

OCTOBER 10, 2017

Seed is the new Series A. (~$2M used get for building product, establishing product-market fit and early revenue). 6M-$15M used to scale customer acquisition and revenue). The amount of capital (and therefore the resulting valuation) also sets the stage for the next round of financing for a company. Engineering Capital.

Seed Stage 82

Seed Stage Finance Later Stage Equity 82

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Some notable metrics are revenue growth rates, free cashflow, leverage ratios, historical financing amounts, returns on marketing spend, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value of customers, customer churn rates, and team social scores. Lighter Capital, a Revenue Based Investing VC, offers a Cost of Capital Calculator.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 1, 2011

Quigo Lands Overture as Client, Rejects Their Acquisition Offer. Around 2003, Quigo was doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue with two main products: a ready-to-use, search engine marketing solution for advertisers called FeedPoint and a contextual advertising platform for publishers called AdSonar.

Semantic 302

Semantic Acquisition Valuation Angel Investor 302

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

There are two reasons to raise money: You have a killer idea that is only partially validated, that you think can get to $50M+ of revenue in 5 years with 80%+ gross margins (if margins are lower, you need a lot more revenue)and you need money to get to product-market fit, or. Not all startups need outside investment to grow.

Cofounder 429

Cofounder Seed Stage Valuation Metrics 429

Up and Running

JANUARY 14, 2022

Our major challenge was how do we compete with companies that have billion-dollar valuations, millions in investor funding, and millions in revenue? Our answer was simple– SEO (search engine optimization). The higher the score, the more Google and other search engines identify the information you provide as being useful.

SEO 104

SEO Software Review Search Acquisition 104

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 14, 2017

Your revenues are declining or you don’t have any revenue at all! Revenues don’t appear overnight; even the greatest success stories had to work hard to start getting traction and growth. Yet if revenues start to decline, or after a few months customers are still leaving you for other solutions, then you may have an issue.

Technical Review 157

Technical Review Architecture Revenue Channel 157

Bryce Dot VC

SEPTEMBER 28, 2015

What that meant is that six companies a year could achieve a hundred million in revenue or a billion in valuation. That being the case, what if we surrounded our founders with other people who weren’t focused on fundraising and valuation, but focused on revenue and customers? or someone else. So we have. Another Indie.vc

Venture Capital 40

Venture Capital Valuation Los Angeles Chicago 40

VC Cafe

JANUARY 2, 2023

While 7,838 tech jobs were lost across 120 companies in 2022, according to an analysis by Tech12 , the demand for engineers remained high with 13,100 open engineering roles. The ten biggest exits of the year included a mix of IPOs and acquisitions. Lower valuations , especially in later stage. Source: Vintage ).

Valuation 158

Valuation Down Round Venture Capital 158

ConversionXL

JANUARY 29, 2014

Customer loyalty expert Fred Reichheld also reports in his book “ The Ultimate Question ” that businesses saw an average of 2x revenue growth by simply increasing their overall brand advocacy by only 12%. If you notice in the examples above, the testimonials are given by directors of growth and customer acquisition. Getsatisfaction.

Software Review 126

Software Review Stock Video Advertising 126

The Next Web

DECEMBER 16, 2012

That’s given us insight into which valuation methods are good, helping site owners clinch that all-important deal, and which fall short, leaving sites unsold and their owners disappointed. Today I want to walk you through the more successful valuation methods in use now. This approach is based on the belief that revenue matters most.

Valuation 128

Valuation NPV Net Present Value IRR 128

VC Cafe

DECEMBER 27, 2022

billion in revenue in 2021, an 8x increase over a five year period, representing 5% of the global gaming revenue. Israel’s proliferation of “social casino” companies has created a strong talent pool in the areas of monetisation and user acquisition. Global gaming revenues. billion in 2016 ( source ).

Generative AI 173

Generative AI Cloud Acquisition 173

www.paulgraham.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

You make elaborate plans for a product, hire a team of engineers to develop it (people who do this tend to use the term "engineer" for hackers), and then find after a year that youve spent two milliondollars to develop something no one wants. So the acquisition came toa screeching halt while we tried to sort this out.

Startup 105

Startup Cofounder Software Stock 105

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

They had a proprietary browser, their own search engine, their own content, chat rooms, email system, etc. billion in annual subscription revenues not including advertising or eCommerce). After a few acquisitions they offered many of the services you think about as foundations to social networks today.

Social Network 318

Social Network Networking Internet Technical Review 318