The Next Web

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We interviewed the heads of the top Web and mobile development companies, incubators, agencies and labs to understand what it takes to design and develop the most successful apps of our generation. If you asked me to build Facebook.com for you, I would quote you $500,000 and nine months of development and design time,” says Schippers.

Cost 168

Cost San Francisco New York City Ruby 168

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 13, 2013

I started as a programmer, and then a database designer, and then a project manager, and I led conversion teams. And for every time I’ve felt hugely stressed that our burn rate was getting too high, and I didn’t know who else was going to fund the company, and I’m all in on this company, right?”

Cofounder 337

Cofounder Technical Cofounder San Diego Startup 337

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2009

They spot opportunities that aren’t being met and the design products to meet these needs. They had wasted a lot of money because they had raised a lot of money and therefore hired a large staff. I just knew that our sales sucked wind and we were burning through tons of cash. We were SMOKING cash.

Entrepreneur 306

Entrepreneur Burn Rate Cofounder Sales 306

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

Surprisingly we have never explicitly articulated or understood that what’s really happening when we hire a new VP or CEO in a startup is that the newly hired executive is implicitly pivoting (radically changing) some portion of the business model. Business Model Design and Customer Development Stack. No one gets fired.

Burn Rate 247

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 247

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

The rest of the organization (product development, marketing, support) has been burning cash, all according to plan, expecting Sales to make its numbers. Blame it On Marketing In the next 3-6 months, a new VP of Sales is hired. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. innovation. Blog at WordPress.com.

Customer Development 224

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

raised their voices in a annoyed investor tone) that the headcount and its attendant burn rate combined with the lack of revenue meant the company would run out of money much sooner than anyone planned. They had designed something much, much better – and much worse. Lets Try to Make the World Match Our Spreadsheet.

Revenue 230

Revenue Balance Sheet Hockey Stick Burn Rate 230

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 7, 2014

Be quick to hire and slow to fire. Hiring after one interview is like hopping a red-eye to Vegas to get married after one date. On the other end of the process, don’t hesitate to pull the trigger fast when a new hire isn’t working, but don’t forget to be human and follow all the steps. Do not delegate this task.

Startup 265

Startup Intellectual Property LLC Burn Rate 265

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 28, 2012

Quick to hire and slow to fire. Hiring after one interview is like hopping a red-eye to Vegas to get married after one date. On the other end of the process, don’t hesitate to pull the trigger fast when a new hire isn’t working, but don’t forget to be human and follow all the steps. Do not delegate this task.

Entrepreneur 274

Entrepreneur Intellectual Property LLC Burn Rate 274

The Equity Kicker

JULY 16, 2015

Companies with lots of cash sometimes add people more quickly, but that drives the burn rate up, often without a compensating increase in the chance of success. Design and development of landing pages and prototypes. Also, early hires should be capable of dealing with ambiguity and fuzzy role definitions.

eCommerce 60

eCommerce Burn Rate Early Stage Hiring 60

Gust

DECEMBER 29, 2013

Be quick to hire and slow to fire. Hiring after one interview is like hopping a red-eye to Vegas to get married after one date. On the other end of the process, don’t hesitate to pull the trigger fast when a new hire isn’t working, but don’t forget to be human and follow all the steps. Do not delegate this task.

Startup 183

Startup Intellectual Property LLC Burn Rate 183

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

In fact, they were screaming at them to dramatically reduce their burn rates. Angel investment, which was small to start with, disappeared, and most corporate VCs shut down. VC’s were no longer insisting that startups spend faster, and “swing for the fences”. It was a nuclear winter for startup capital.”

Lean 214

Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Eric Friedman

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

In the world of web startups, you can hire individuals and try to make the team hum, or you can buy an agile group that you know can perform. 2 designers. Hiring Option. Hire 2 people per month ~ $100K/month/per person across 12 months is 24 people at a $2.4MM burn rate. lets call it $10MM. 2 engineers.

Burn Rate 90

Burn Rate Agile Equity Hiring 90

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Blog at WordPress.com.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Hearpreneur

JULY 7, 2019

I see companies transitioning to hiring more freelancers and remote workers. When they outsource they are hiring professionals for a certain number of hours per month and not 40 hours per week in addition to benefits, workers comp, etc. We want every hire to be for life, and the way we treat employees makes them want to stay.

Entrepreneur 93

Entrepreneur Distribution Employee Arizona 93

crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 12, 2014

We do like to talk about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, economics and other interesting stuff! Don’t Get Burned by Your Burn Rate – crowdspring.co/159KKrk. Is The Grid a better web designer than you? I hope you enjoy!

Social Media 100

Social Media Small Business Design Media 100

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

In ten years, from the early 1950′s to the early 1960′s, the valley went through a hiring frenzy as jobs in microwave companies went from 700 to 7,000. An interesting phenomena of the 1920s that illustrates the fragility and cost of vacuum tubes is the “Reflex Receiver&# design methodology. to do that.

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 270

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Designing the Perfect Building Once the commitment to fix everything wrong was in place, we were off and running on the design phase. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. The exec staff started meeting about the design of the new building. I was great at “office wars.”)

Silicon Valley 205

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). Were talking PayPal -sized variations.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

OnlyOnce

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

In the early stages, you have to hire generalists who are both willing and able to take on dozens of tasks at once. And no matter how good an executive search firm is, I’ve never met a CEO who has a better than 50% success rate in hiring new leaders from the outside. By and large, startups work the same way.

Burn Rate 71

Burn Rate Leadership Search Curation 71

OnlyOnce

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

In the early stages, you have to hire generalists who are both willing and able to take on dozens of tasks at once. And no matter how good an executive search firm is, I’ve never met a CEO who has a better than 50% success rate in hiring new leaders from the outside. By and large, startups work the same way.

Burn Rate 48

Burn Rate Leadership Search Curation 48

www.paulgraham.com

APRIL 28, 2010

For example, a seed firmshould be able to give advice about how to approach VCs, which VCsobviously dont need to do; whereas VCs should be able to giveadvice about how to hire an "executive team," which is not an issuein the seed stage. You dont have to spend time on bureaucraticstuff, because you havent hired any bureaucrats yet.

Technical Review 76

Technical Review Startup Software Review Angel Investor 76

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

And even worse, wed cranked up the burn rate in order to be ready to handle all those millions of mainstream customers we anticipated. Worse, we tricked ourselves into thinking that what the press said about our success was actually true. When they failed to materialize, the company was in big trouble.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Hire the absolute best and the brightest, true experts in their fields, who in turn can hire the smartest people possible to staff their departments. Insist on high levels of usability, UI design, and polish. The passionate early adopters who flocked to the product at its launch could not sustain this outsized burn rate.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150