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Corporate Venture Capital: Obligatory or Oxymoron?

David Teten

Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of SNAZZ, a cloud-based event management platform. Teten: For a large corporate, what are the advantages and disadvantages of a dedicated fund (possibly with external investors) vs. a 100% on-balance sheet investor? Could they excel at customer development with enterprises?

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No Accounting For Startups

Steve Blank

Managing the Business. One of the ways our VC’s kept track of our progress was by taking a monthly look at three financial documents: Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement. To be clear – Income Statements, Balance Sheets and Cash Flow Statements are really important at two points in your startup.

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9 Deadliest Start-up Sins

Steve Blank

The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. Neither management nor investors tolerate “wrong turns” that result in delays. Financial progress is tracked using metrics like income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow.

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Death By Revenue Plan

Steve Blank

The Appendix of your business plan has one of the leading cause of death of startups: the financial spreadsheets you attached as your Income Statement, Balance Sheets and Cash Flow Statements. Spread out in front of everyone around the conference table were the latest Income Statement, Balance Sheets and Cash Flow Statements.

Revenue 230
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Why Companies are Not Startups

Steve Blank

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. Product management tools like Stage-Gate ® emerged to systematically manage Waterfall product development.

IRR 335
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Reinventing the Board Meeting – Part 1 of 2

Steve Blank

Traditional startup board meetings spend an insane amount of wasted time using Fortune 100 company metrics like income statements, cash flow, balance sheet, waterfall charts. The only numbers in those documents that are important in the first year of a startup’s life are burn rate and cash balance. The Wrong Metrics.

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Why Board Meetings Suck – Part 1 of 2

Steve Blank

Traditional startup board meetings spend an insane amount of wasted time using Fortune 100 company metrics like income statements, cash flow, balance sheet, waterfall charts. The only numbers in those documents that are important in the first year of a startup’s life are burn rate and cash balance. The Wrong Metrics.