Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

Things will cost more than you expect. Always add 20 percent to your best estimate of funding requirements when approaching investors. For example, a software development startup raising $250,000 from angel investors better be able to operate on $25,000 per month. Buffer your projected resource requirements.

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Burn Rate Hockey Stick Startup Salary 120

This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 22, 2013

In a seed or friends and family round, tough questions, in the eyes of many founders, signal an investor that will either a) never get to the writing a check part or b) be such a pain in the ass afterwards that it might not be worth taking their money. Something isn''t going to go your way--product development, hiring, revenues.

Technical Review 118

Technical Review Due Diligence Angel Investor Venture Capital 118

Up and Running

JULY 2, 2014

We developed a kick-ass investor pitch and we started pitching it to family, friends, angel investors, and even venture capitalists for feedback. We soon got interest from an angel investor, and he wanted to invest $300,000 in our startup. The deal we made with him was he’d get 33.3% We were on a roll.

Technical Review 118

Technical Review Angel Investor Due Diligence Dilution 118

Berkonomics

AUGUST 10, 2017

Since this number is budgeted and pre-authorized, managers tend to focus upon other things such as sales, marketing and product development issues. There is an art to efficient management of a process, whether that is the process of bringing a product to market from R&D to production or developing a new product’s launch program.

Silicon Valley 97

Silicon Valley Burn Rate Angel Investor Down Round 97

Up and Running

MAY 12, 2015

Getting feedback on your pitch is a great idea; the more people evaluate your pitch before your investors see it, the more chances you have to catch any errors in reasoning, assumptions that are unclear to your audience, or things that just simply don’t make sense or flow well. See Also 5 Sure-fire Ways to Bomb Your Investor Pitch.

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Angel Investor Software Review Technical Cofounder Due Diligence 60

Business Plan Blog

DECEMBER 10, 2013

The Milestones Angel Investors Care About. When raising pre-seed capital from friends, family, and founders (FFF) you’ll want to consider the milestones that Angel investors care about and be sure to raise enough capital to reach those milestones. Product Development.

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Angel Investor Intellectual Property Seed Capital Advisory Board 55

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Convertible debt financings have become an increasingly attractive approach for seed rounds because it delays the valuation discussion, costs less from a legal standpoint, and is an easier financial instrument to “keep raising more small amounts of money” on. The investors, founders, and “community” are all super excited about ASC.

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Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

Home About Contact Me How To Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur Vinicius Vacanti Guide to Finding a Technical Co-Founder September 7, 2010 | View Comments Steve Job's Technical Co-Founder “I’ve got this HUGE idea. I just need to find a technical co-founder.&# I was in this situation and we barely escaped.

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Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Ruby 43

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 24, 2014

You can double that number if you add the amount of money put up by Angel Investors. Angel Investors, VCs and entrepreneurs agree that the success rate for startup companies is dismal. To be successful, the company needs to grow beyond the founders without losing its competitive edge.

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Startup Angel Investor Early Stage LLC 252

VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

A founder asked me what makes a $2M round “pre-seed”? especially if the startup already has a product and revenue? What’s the difference between an angel round and pre-seed round and why do I believe we’ll see more pre-seed rounds taking place in 2024? who’s talking to customers?)

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Valuation Software Review Generative AI Technical Review 186

Berkonomics

MARCH 30, 2010

Since this number is budgeted and pre-authorized, managers tend to focus upon other things such as sales, marketing and product development issues. There is an art to efficient management of a process, whether that is the process of bringing a product to market from R&D to production or developing a new product’s launch program.

Silicon Valley 85

Silicon Valley Burn Rate Angel Investor Down Round 85

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2010

There were prominent founders of business like PriceGrabber, LowerMyBills and MyLife. We’ll be conducting a series of educational programes covering: fund raising, team building, product development, sales, marketing, business development and how to prioritize your time as a CEO. . And of course we had, TheMan.

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Los Angeles Stealth Securities and Exchange Commission Southern California 276

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 14, 2015

It really takes a complementary pair of founders to improve the odds. Consider the original founders of Apple and Microsoft as examples. Since both skills are required in equal amounts for success, the single founder failure rate today is reported to far exceed 50 percent. Do both in parallel to be timely.

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Technical Review Startup Angel Investor Social Media 120

Business Plan Blog

NOVEMBER 22, 2013

The use of your initial friends, family, and founders (FFF) capital should be directed towards achieving the milestones that will attract seed or angel investors (likewise, the use of your seed funding should be directed towards achieving the milestones that will attract Series A investors). Intellectual property.

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Intellectual Property Advisory Board Startup Seed Capital 55

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

“If you can fix a problem for someone and do it better, quicker, and/or cheaper than your competitor, you’re off to a good start.” – Gabriel Kuperman, founder and CEO of CuePin. The software was sold based on installation cost running on local servers for enterprises—which was very, very expensive.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers - SoCal CTO , November 1, 2010 I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ? You got it.

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

www.readwriteweb.com

OCTOBER 18, 2010

But you have, perhaps, heard less specific discussions on what angel investors are looking for. Well, some angel investors are looking for exactly the same thing as what VCs are looking for. In other words, these are angels looking for billion dollar opportunities as well.

Marketing 52

Marketing Bootstrapping Incubator Angel Investor 52

www.readwriteweb.com

OCTOBER 18, 2010

But you have, perhaps, heard less specific discussions on what angel investors are looking for. Well, some angel investors are looking for exactly the same thing as what VCs are looking for. In other words, these are angels looking for billion dollar opportunities as well.

Marketing 52

Marketing Bootstrapping Incubator Angel Investor 52

ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 13, 2010

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup , the new book by David Cohen , founder and CEO of TechStars, and Brad Feld , managing director of Foundry Group, came out this week, and the authors are in the middle of a fast-paced tour around the U.S. Contributors include dozens of TechStars mentors and founder alumni.

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Angel Investor Application Development Naming Product Development 121

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

what are the most crucial steps to be taken by a new tech startup when outsourcing major part of the tech to IT firms or outsourcing “product development” eg new social media website project? Near shoring development with your team (ex: your team is based in Canada / India) is cool, but not outsourcing.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

mashable.com

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011

While all of these factors are true to an extent, the truth of the matter is that the reduced costs of hardware and software are easily offset by the expense of engineers and experienced business people. I’m now in my second founder/CEO role, having raised more than $18.5 million in venture financing. .&#

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Startup Social Media RSS Social Network 79

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

So for this first post, here’s the best advice I can give you: join an awesome founding team and get your product out the door ASAP. One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. Then, forget everything else, VCs included, and just build.

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Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Scalable Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2013

In the last five years, there’s been this sort of acknowledgment of the consumerization of the enterprise, which is consumer product development, design methods applied to business software, of which SaaS and cloud and all these things are examples. I can switch to SaaS for less than the cost of the maintenance on the old software.”

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Software Review Startup Venture Capital Stock 22

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Find Questions, Topics and People Add Question Add Question Team Configuration 500 Startups Guerilla Marketing Organizations Entrepreneurship Startup Founders & Entrepreneurs Startups Startup Incubators and Seed Programs Seedcamp Y Combinator TechStars Lean Startups What is the perfect startup team? They are many more examples.

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Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of product development Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

.” Hackernews list of “Tools of the Trade” for startups - includes over 150 SaaS tools used by startups, and over 150 comments with interesting insights from founders. tells you how much adwords cost. Great for visualizing work of product development. hire low-cost international engineering talent.

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Software Review Technical Review Startup 53