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). Board Control.

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Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

For life sciences it was the Genentech IPO in 1980 that proved to investors that life science startups could make them a ton of money. Continuous innovation requires the imagination and courage to challenge the initial hypotheses of your current business model (channel, cost, customers, products, supply chain, etc.)

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Scalable Startup

AUGUST 26, 2014

the original products can’t generate revenue, so when these OS projects occassionally blow up into phenomenons like Drupal and WordPress have over the past few years, it’s gratifying but also quite frustrating to watch others derive so much value from your baby while you toil away to lead its growth with no financial return.

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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.

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infochachkie.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

There is an inherent conflict in a consultant’s business model and the needs of a startup. For instance, if a consultant proposes to help you with public relations, pay them a commission equivalent to the greater of a flat fee per story placed or a percentage of revenue generated from the PR coverage.

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Agile VC

APRIL 13, 2012

And going even further back there have been a few random ones have been built before like Salesforce.com and e-tailer RedEnvelope (IPO’d in 2003 though now defunct as a company). If my memory serves me, <10% of our pre-IPO employees at PayPal lived in SF and literally 1 of the first 40-50 folks at LinkedIn were city-dwellers.

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VC Cafe

JULY 6, 2010

Israel’s largest online portal) from inception to IPO as well as Oren Nauman, formerly CEO of Mobival , who serves as deputy CEO at Libox. We analyze your bandwidth and make all your stuff very simple. VC Cafe: What is you business model? How are you planning ramp up the revenue? He made it very profitable.

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