Feld Thoughts

OCTOBER 18, 2019

One of the many great things about the Governor of Colorado is that he’s an entrepreneur, having started multiple successful technology companies, including BlueMountainArts.com (acquired by Excite for $800m) and Provide Commerce (IPO, then acquired by Liberty Media for $500m).

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Colorado Government IPO Cofounder 70

BeyondVC

APRIL 4, 2018

Look at the Dropbox IPO which priced above its initial value and came out white hot at the end of one of the worst weeks in stock market performance. Despite that, it’s also hard to ignore the following facts: Enormous spend and growth for public cloud and app infrastructure, middleware and developer software of $50b (Gartner, Pivotal S-1).

Cloud 60

Cloud Agile Architecture Azure 60

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

And I’ve been lucky enough to watch innovation happen not only in hardware and software but in Life Sciences – in Therapeutics, Medical Devices, Diagnostics and now Digital Health. In the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, momentum shifted to the enterprise as large businesses supported innovation in PCs, communications hardware and enterprise software.

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Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 230

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 17, 2022

Mobile and web software apps may cost even less. Many have disappeared, and others have forgotten how to be agile and innovative. VCs tend to carry their partners much longer, in hopes of a big public offering (IPO) that could produce a windfall. Some VC firms are bogged down by their own weight.

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Angel Investor Venture Capital Silicon Valley Portfolio 342

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, March 25, 2009 The Lean Startup at Agile Vancouver April 21st A surprising number of respondents in the latest Lessons Learned survey hail from one of the flourishing startup hubs in Canada. This workshop brings together leading thinkers from Lean Production and Lean software. Thank you so much!)

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Agile Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Agile VC

NOVEMBER 6, 2013

Twitter’s IPO has garnered a ton of attention in the tech and popular press. So their revenue figures, pre IPO financing and ownership, and other info is all widely available. Growth IPOs Are Back. Instagram hadn’t built a true business (e.g. Value of Media vs E-Commerce vs Premium Services.

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IPO Aggregator B2B Internet 194

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. Especially for a startup, not taking maximum advantage of free software is crazy.

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Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 15, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 15, 2010 Some IPO speculation Inspired by Steve Blank’s post today about the “lost decade&# of IPO’s , I’d like to make some predictions. The fact that IPO’s are disappearing makes intuitive sense to me. Let me be clear: Steve is the historian.

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IPO San Francisco Lean Silicon Valley 166

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 19, 2020

Mobile and web software apps may cost even less. Many have disappeared, and others have forgotten how to be agile and innovative. VCs tend to carry their partners much longer, in hopes of a big public offering (IPO) that could produce a windfall. Some VC firms are bogged down by their own weight.

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Angel Investor Venture Capital Silicon Valley Startup 314

Agile VC

NOVEMBER 9, 2015

Square filed its S-1 several weeks ago and is now in the middle of its IPO road show process. A bunch of articles came out saying that Square had “priced” their IPO below last round and this was something terrible ranging from the bursting of a tech bubble to the coming of the apocalypse. Revenue Composition.

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IPO .Net Revenue Acquisition 165

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. The same might be said of good software. Here we have the beginnings of a theory of design for software.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

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. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal.

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

VC Cafe

AUGUST 2, 2022

On the infrastructure side, Epic owns ‘Unreal Engine’ the second most popular 3D graphic engine, and creator of MetaHumans, a digital twin rendering software that can be used to create hyper realistic characters to ‘populate’ the Metaverse. Fortnite generated $5.8 Roblox is publicly traded and has a market cap of $27.2

IP 206

IP Cofounder Valuation Acquisition 206

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Dot.com Bubble ( 1995-2000): “ Anything goes” as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability. Software companies had to buy specialized computers and license expensive software. The IPO offering document became the playbook for startups.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Agile VC

JANUARY 13, 2016

A pure software company might have 80-90%+ gross profit margins, but a commerce company might at best be 30-50% and service marketplaces might be far lower when measured on a gross revenue / GMV basis. Many people valued Zynga and Groupon at $20-30B+, both buyers of shares on secondary markets and investment banks during the run up to IPO.

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Technical Review .Net Revenue Software Review 157

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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IPO Silicon Valley Revenue Seed Stage 100

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. Can this methodology be used for startups that are not exclusively about software? Expo SF (May.

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Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Agile VC

JULY 11, 2012

Burr, Egan, Deleage [Boston] –> Huge wins in the 1980s and early 90s included Continental Cablevision (sold for $5.3B – now a big chunk of what is Comcast), Qwest Communications, Cephalon (biotech IPO, acq by Teva), and Powersoft (Burr, Egan made 35x when it went public and then was acquired by Sybase).

Silicon Valley 240

Silicon Valley Carried Interest Cofounder Boston 240

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

For those whove heard it, it contains a length discourse on the subject of agile software development and extreme programming, including its weaknesses when applied to startups. As Im pontificating about agile, I see the name Kent Beck in my peripheral vision. Now, this webcast was packed, hundreds of people were logged in.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 140

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. November 5, 2008 10:13 AM spanky said.

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Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

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. Much of the press on the company’s IPO highlights this fact, which is easy to discern from a casual read of the S-1. I’ll break down Chewy’s business based on their recent S-1 filing here.

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Leadership .Net Revenue Acquisition 100

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. =. Kayak Software Corporation.

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Pre-Money Valuation Liquidation Preference Dividend Common Stock 113

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. My experience is in Enterprise Software - where we are forced to chunk features into formal releases. Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what. Thank you. I know it's going to help me immensely!

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

They just assumed it was the way software companies worked. Unfortunately, threats work a lot better at incentivizing people to CYA than getting them to write quality software. When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming , I thought I had found the answer. Sound good?

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

I thought Id share a little bit of that, too: I’ve been interested in different approaches to software development going back to 1987 when – in my first company Feld Technologies – my partner Dave Jilk and I started talking about “semi-custom software development&# (way ahead of its time). Read the rest.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

This builds on a lot of great thinking that has come before, like the agile movements insistence that only the creation of working code counts as progress for a software development team. a guide for hackers) You buy virtual goods The free software hiring advantage Continuous deployment and continuous learning The lean startup @ Web 2.0

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

That leads to a seemingly-obvious question: what is progress in software development? Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto. Labels: agile , continuous deployment , lean startup , product development , Test-driven development 4comments: Nivi said. But it worked. We made it. So can you. I am not a developer.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. For software, the easiest batch to see is code. When something goes wrong with production software, its almost always because of an unintended side-effect of some piece of code.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. I know many people who think that software works like magic, but to me it actually was magic. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

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. Netscape’s 1995 IPO changed the rules. It includes venture funded startups in all industries, from software to biotech. Here’s why. Source: NVCA.).

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Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 302

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. Please leave feedback!) Can you make a build in one step? Youd better.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. All customers will see the new software as soon as it’s deployed.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, Hey Someone else who is extending the agile/lean approach beyond just developing software. Hey Someone else who is extending the agile/lean approach beyond just developing software. February 9, 2009 7:45 PM Joseph Flahiff said.

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Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 27, 2014

Mobile and web software apps may cost even less. Many have disappeared, and others have forgotten how to be agile and innovative. VCs tend to carry their partners much longer, in hopes of a big public offering (IPO) that could produce a windfall. Some VC firms are bogged down by their own weight.

Angel Investor 260

Angel Investor Silicon Valley Startup Portfolio 260

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

Kent Beck is deservedly famous for his many contributions in the software industry. Kent Beck is deservedly famous for his many contributions in the software industry. His characteristic humility and clear thinking were on display as he casually demolished one sacred cow after another. Of course ideas have to evolve and change.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. VC’s invested in things that ran on electrons: hardware, software and silicon. In 1980 Genentech became the first IPO of a venture funded biotech company. Here’s why. Electron-based Venture Capital. They build a minimum feature set.

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Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 262