Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than ones opponent." Agile software development. Agile allows companies to build higher quality software faster. Customer development.

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Agile VC

MARCH 8, 2012

Tech IPOs Are Back – So Now What? Three of the five “blockbuster” tech IPOs I predicted have happened (LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga) and the biggest of all (Facebook) has filed and will likely go public within the next 90 days. I see several dynamics at work in today’s IPO markets. March 8, 2012.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. We finally settled on a $1.99 Setup a simple website.

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Agile VC

APRIL 17, 2011

GameFly filed in 2010 and remains in registration, though 2011 has seen a positive start for VC-backed IPOs with 14 in Q1 2011. 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. =. 2010 Operating Income: $16 million.

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Agile VC

FEBRUARY 2, 2012

Facebook S-1: The Most Anticipated IPO in a Decade. Here’s my first look at Facebook viewed through the lens of their IPO filing. who derive a meaningful chunk of their revenue from operating ad networks. To put that in perspective, Facebook’s overall operations (which are highly profitable) generated about $1.5

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Eventually, I hope to get them on a full agile diet, with TDD, scrums, sprints, pair programming, and more. Indeed the first thing I thought when I read the first paragraphs that the product manager was operating in a white tower and that the developers felt disenfranchised. October 6, 2008 12:17 AM r& said. Expo SF (May.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. While individual VC’s inside venture firms specialized in particular domains (PC’s, peripherals, semiconductors, test equipment, operating systems, applications, etc.,) In 1980 Genentech became the first IPO of a venture funded biotech company.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product. Yet other agile principles suggest the opposite, as in YAGNI and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts. Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers. But they are pushing for the things that matter to customers - features. And they are cognizant that their funding is limited, and if they dont find out which features are absolutely critical for their customers soon, they wont be able to survive.

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Agile VC

JUNE 5, 2011

So Groupon obviously filed their S-1 the other day to formally being the IPO process. Cumulative customers (unique buyers of Groupons): 15.8M (Q1 2011), 9.0M (2010), 0.4M (2009). AGILEVC My idle thoughts on tech startups. Groupon’s S-1: From Zero to Like… Billions in 30 Months. June 5, 2011. to the merchant.

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Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

This all changed in 1980 with the Genentech IPO. In 1980 Genentech became the first IPO of a venture funded biotech company. Yet for the last 40 years, while technical founders knew that no business plan survived first contact with customers, they lacked a management tool set for learning, discovery and experimentation.

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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. In the 20th century tech companies and their investors made money through an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Hire a CEO to Go Public.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

One team is in charge of carrying out the vision as currently specified, and one team is constantly asking the skeptical questions: who is the customer? One team is in charge of carrying out the vision as currently specified, and one team is constantly asking the skeptical questions: who is the customer? Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web. Recently, he was bitten by the lean startup bug and has started writing about his experiences attempting to apply lean startup and customer development principles. On the one hand, this is the ultimate in customer responsiveness.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

If we accept the verdict of customers instead of pundits, I think these claims are easy to dismiss. For example, imagine a team operating in a traditional waterfall development system, without continuous deployment, test-driven development, or continuous integration. Another is used by marketing to refer to what customers see.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

At Toyota , they are called Chief Engineer : Toyota realizes that the Chief Engineer job is probably the most important one in the company because the Chief Engineer listens to the customer and then determines what the functions need to do to address the customer’s desires. What is customer development? Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

That mission critical customers wont accept new releases on a continuous basis. Most customers of most products hate new releases. So asking customers if theyd like to receive new releases more often usually leads to a consistent answer: "No, thank you." Implicit in these concerns are two beliefs: 1. Lets take each in turn.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

For example, lets say you dont have an operations team, and so youre still getting paged late at night when servers crash. Is it time to make your first operations hire? If youre coming in to work groggy and therefore are not spending time with customers, Im willing to bet it is. That depends. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Ive previously written about the advantages of having a pathetically small number of customers , and how to get started with customer segmentation. it seemed time to return to the subject of investigating who my customers are. Thats a common pattern to gaining customer insight. Customer knows they have a problem.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Because of the extreme unknowns inherent in startup situations, we are all blind – to the realities of what customers what, market dynamics, and competitive threats. For example, a recent event I held started with a customer validation exercise (actually, this example is fictionalized for clarity). What’s happening?

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Agile VC

MARCH 5, 2019

Early on, one of the key questions for all ride sharing companies was the breadth & depth of usage by their customers. If you look at the yearly cohort level though, you do see a pattern where on average people use Lyft more frequently the longer they are a customer. Analysis of Lyft S-1 Cohort Data.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Of course, its possible that after the product is shipped and customer feedback is solicited, the next product design might be different. When it becomes possible to build products "live" with customers, the cycle time changes and design becomes a much more dynamic process. At no point is the overall purpose of the design changing.

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ReadWriteStart

APRIL 26, 2012

There used to be the Four Horsemen of the IPO world, back in the '80s and '90s. They all went away; they got rolled up in 1999 and 2000 into these too-big-to-fail banking operations," Davidson tells us. When they exited the scene, the small IPO market followed suit. Brown & Sons, Montgomery Securities. The question is why?

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

To do that they need to understand value, communicate with other business people (like bankers and VCs) about value, and communicate with prospective customers about value. these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May.

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Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Agile VC

JUNE 13, 2019

I know some of the investors in Chewy prior to the PetSmart acquisition, but I am not a shareholder nor do I intend to purchase shares in the IPO. Embedded Growth From Existing Customers. One of the key features of Chewy’s business is the recurring nature of customer purchases. For example, Chewy’s 2015 cohort (e.g.

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Agile VC

AUGUST 9, 2012

The company’s lost nearly 80% of its value from the peak earlier this year, in the run up to Facebook’s IPO, and currently trades below $3/share… a fraction of it’s IPO price of $10. multiple (net of cash) of either adjusted EBITDA or operating cashflow. That much we all know. trailing revenue multiple.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 23, 2009

Customers say,&# Give me feature X,&# “Give me feature Y,&# and sometimes you do what they want, maybe sometimes you’re going to do what you want, and then they get mad at you. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? We’re not moving in the right direction.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2008

In a typical lean company, waste is defined as "every activity that does not create value for the customer." By the standard of "customer value," most innovation-seeking experiments are waste. Lean startups operate by a different standard. Everything else (including a lot of traditional "agile" or "lean" tactics) is waste.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Executives coming to my product development classes report operating at 98.5

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

When I first wrote about the advantages of having a pathetically small number of customers , I only had 5 subscribers. Of course, 1000 customers is pretty pathetically small too. Its also time to start thinking about customer segments. So how do you get started with customer segmentation? Thank you all for stopping by.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

The six key attributes spell ABCDEF: Agility. When talking about their past experience, candidates with agility will know why they did what they did in a given situation. To probe for agility, you have to ask the candidate questions involving something that they know little about. I have found this quite rare in engineers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Rather than use boring section headers, I thought Id just quote from actual customers, in their own words. Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. For my first time, it was scalability problems and our operations team. why didnt operations get paged? How do you get started with five whys?

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