Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. So far, I have found "lean startup" works better with the entrepreneurs Ive talked to than "agile startup" or even "extreme startup.") Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal.

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

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. How They Make Money : Facebook’s primary revenue stream is of course selling advertising on Facebook.com, which in total accounts for 85% of revenue. 2011 YoY Revenue Growth: 88%.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. Startup lifecycle in an IPO Market. Until 1995 startups going public typically had a track record of revenue and profits. Netscape’s 1995 IPO changed the rules. Here’s why. Free At Last.

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Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 297

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?) Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Agile VC

JUNE 5, 2011

So Groupon obviously filed their S-1 the other day to formally being the IPO process. They’ve grown from nothing to >$2B in revenue in 30 months time, making the company among the fastest growing businesses in the histroy of the world. Financial Snapshot: 2010 Revenue: $713M. in net revenue and passes $0.58

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North America Chicago Boston Silicon Valley 100

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. In 1980 Genentech became the first IPO of a venture funded biotech company. It’s because the startups are doing something very new that make them “Lean&# : These startups embrace customer and agile development that Eric Ries has been evangelizing.

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Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 258

Agile VC

OCTOBER 1, 2013

Facebook’s IPO was obviously a debacle, and in the private investment sphere valuations from the seed through late stage have declined for the most part from their peaks in late 2011 through early 2012. IPO Market Is Strong - All the companies I just mentioned in cloud computing have gone public within the last 12 months.

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IPO Cloud Valuation Mobile 147

Agile VC

MAY 16, 2019

I have friends who are execs or shareholders of the company, but I have no stake in Slack nor intent to invest in the IPO. A somewhat unique thing about the Slack IPO is that they’re pursuing a direct listing on the NYSE. Slack’s net dollar retention rate is an incredibly impressive 143%. So Slack generated $1.43

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Lock-up Period Retention Azure .Net 100

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Agile VC

MARCH 5, 2019

There are a variety of quick write-ups on the Lyft S-1 for basic figures like annual revenue, rider growth, or who the largest shareholders are. Lyft helpfully provides the number of active riders, total number of rides, and average revenue per rider on a quarterly basis. Rough estimate of 2019 revenue, excluding new riders.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis. I am chugging along.

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San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets. They are on-schedule and on-budget, but their gross metrics are way off. Expo SF (May.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Agile VC

MAY 26, 2011

Google is still a private company (their IPO was Aug 2004). LinkedIn’s product had only been live for a couple months, we only had tens of thousands of registered users, and wouldn’t start generating revenue for more than a year after this point. is the leading consumer internet company with Terry Semel as CEO.

Term Sheet 178

Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

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).

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Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 245

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. February 21, 2009 7:39 AM Rocky1138 said. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. Naturally, they had just raised money, and their new investors were understandably pissed. Expo SF (May.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Agile VC

MAY 22, 2014

Unfortunately Alibaba doesn’t actually break out revenue by marketplace or business unit. In fact JD.com, which priced it’s IPO yesterday, is a direct seller (e.g. The makeup of the revenue is different too (see #4 below). And most importantly how attractive is the whole based on the sum of the underlying parts?

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China Revenue Flash Affiliate 159

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

The agile software movement has made numerous contributions: continuous integration, which helps accelerate feedback about defects; story cards and kanban that reduce batch size; a daily stand-up that increases tempo. In fact, excess time pressure is exactly why they think they have these problems in the first place. Expo SF (May.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

What is the right revenue model? Aside from the dramatically shorter development cycle that browser games enjoy, the split testing of features (which is intuitive to web application makers) is something that propelled Zynga's games and revenues to the top of the social games vertical. August 24, 2009 2:17 PM Norbert Mocsnik said.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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. Zynga’s trailing revenue is nearly $1.2B trailing revenue multiple. That much we all know.

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Stock LBO .Net Valuation 160

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Some of these benefits are shared by agile systems which have continuous integration but large batch releases, but others are unique to continuous deployment. No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero. No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

View from Seed

JUNE 17, 2015

We were a profitable company at that point with nearly $200M annualized revenue, one of the first tech companies to IPO after the dot-com bubble. Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Lee’s personal blog, Agile VC. When we started LinkedIn , it was a similar situation.

Startup 120

Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 120

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. revenue business still growing >50% YoY? Chewy now has over 10 million customers, repeat purchases by existing customers account for approximately 90% of their revenue today.

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Agile VC

MAY 23, 2012

In the wake of the undue frenzy leading up to and now ex post recriminations about Facebook’s IPO, the mainstream media and normal folks keep wondering if the non-existent “bubble” for internet companies has now popped. The End of “Internet” Companies. May 23, 2012. Silly stuff like this.

Internet 182

Internet Silicon Valley IPO Seed Stage 182

Agile VC

JUNE 17, 2015

We were a profitable company at that point with nearly $200M annualized revenue, one of the first tech companies to IPO after the dot-com bubble. But the first real time we had a big celebration and folks felt like we’d “made it” was the party we held in the parking lot on February 14, 2002 when PayPal went public.

Startup 188

Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 188

Agile VC

JANUARY 13, 2016

It used to take 5-10 years for a great startup to go from $0 to $75-100M+ in annual revenue. A $100M revenue company which has hit an asymptote of growth is unlikely to be worth $1B+ in enterprise value, even if it reached that point far more rapidly than most companies before it. Revenue is revenue, right?

Technical Review 157

Technical Review .Net Revenue Software Review 157

Agile VC

JANUARY 27, 2012

Revenue ramp of Groupon and Zynga –> Kleiner famously said Zynga was the fastest growing company they’d ever invested in , no mean feat for the original backers of Google, Amazon, Netscape, etc, and Groupon might be the fastest ever startup to reach $1B in revenue.

Hockey Stick 113

Hockey Stick Seed Stage Silicon Valley Syndicate 113

Agile VC

AUGUST 1, 2012

The best example of this was Facebook’s disclosure during their IPO process back in May that “mobile” usage was increasing significantly but FB’s monetization of mobile users lagged considerably. Gaming is still the largest category, where you see multiple mobile game companies with $100M+ revenue (e.g.

Mobile 160

Mobile Advertising Bandwidth Web 160

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. And its hard to know if youre truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

It was still a year away from its IPO. We Changed Our Mind In 1966, 10 years after Hewlett’s memo, Hewlett Packard’s revenue and headcount had grown ten fold; $200 million and 11,000 employees – all from test and measurement equipment. Agilent is a $5.8 But first some background.)

Silicon Valley 164

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 164

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

Business and Revenue Model – How do we organize to make money? Waterfall, Agile, Lean? M&A, IPO? Customer Development Steps – How do we iterate with customers? Intellectual Property/Patents – Strategic or Tactical, timing? Regulatory Issues – What are they? Time to Market – How long? Manufacturing – How do you build it?

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Agile VC

JUNE 17, 2015

We were a profitable company at that point with nearly $200M annualized revenue, one of the first tech companies to IPO after the dot-com bubble. But the first real time we had a big celebration and folks felt like we’d “made it” was the party we held in the parking lot on February 14, 2002 when PayPal went public.

Startup 100

Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 100

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. ► 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. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 148

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. Almost all of them got scooped up by pre-IPO Google this time. That year, right before the IPO, those months mattered a great deal in terms of financial outcomes. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94