VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

In some Unicorns, the company was co-founded by Israelis but the centre of operation is US (like in the case of Coursera), so curators have to apply their own judgement on whether the startup is considered Israeli or not. More than 17 Israeli unicorns graduated so far in 2021. Israeli unicorns have evolved in recent years.

Lock-up Period 218

Lock-up Period Merger IPO 218

Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Airbnb founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia had difficulty securing funding, so they launched a mini project to build some funds and catch investors' attention. Using this capital , the founders launched and enjoyed exponential growth in their first year, with 10K users and thousands of listings. Photo Credit: Jack Underwood.

Entrepreneur 92

Entrepreneur Bankruptcy Southern California South Africa 92

David Teten

AUGUST 20, 2019

I’ve been a traditional equity VC for 8 years, and I’m now researching Revenue-Based Investing and other new approaches to VC. The question I’m asking myself: should a new VC fund use Revenue-Based Investing, traditional equity VC, or possibly both (likely from two separate pools of capital)? Greater transparency to limited partners.

Revenue 60

Revenue SBIC Cofounder Venture Capital 60

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

If a company has reached a level of success, has been around for a few years and you believe the company has potential to break out into a much bigger company then you should let the founders take money off of the table. Founders however are asked to take low salaries and never really get back the time they worked for free.

Founder 329

Founder Liquidation Preference Term Sheet Participating Preferred 329

View from Seed

MAY 16, 2019

I have friends who are execs or shareholders of the company, but I have no stake in Slack nor intent to invest in the IPO. If you haven’t seen these already, here are some of the headline figures about Slack’s business: $400M in GAAP revenue in the most recent year (fiscal year ’19 ended 1/31/19). 10M+ daily active users (DAUs).

Lock-up Period 168

Lock-up Period Retention Azure .Net 168

Campus Entrepreneurship

DECEMBER 23, 2010

Booth has announced a course called Building Interet Strartups: Risk, Reward, and Failure and it is being taught by two of Groupon’s co-founders. Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, the Chicago-based cofounders of the social coupon website, Groupon, turned down an offer from Google in early December.

Cofounder 61

Cofounder Chicago Founder IPO 61

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2013

For starters let me use “CEO” as a proxy to include her “inner circle” which might mean co-founders or might just mean senior execs of the business. The Mind of the Founder. A cautious person wouldn’t try to pry people out of Twitter right before their IPO to” join my cause!!”

Startup 417

Startup Dilution San Diego Stock Options 417

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2010

This episode of This Week in Venture Capital featured Michael Montgomery, president of Montgomery & Co. If you don’t know Montgomery & Co it is one of the premier technology & media focused investment banks in the country (and as Michael corrected me they also have a strong Healthcare / Med tech practice).

IPO 242

IPO Venture Capital Private Placement Cofounder 242

Agile VC

MAY 16, 2019

I have friends who are execs or shareholders of the company, but I have no stake in Slack nor intent to invest in the IPO. A somewhat unique thing about the Slack IPO is that they’re pursuing a direct listing on the NYSE. But it does mean that traditional 180 day lock-up periods won’t generally apply to existing Slack shareholders.

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Lock-up Period Retention Azure .Net 100

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 19, 2019

But in today’s world, speed-to-scale entrepreneurship is what we need to improve society, transform industries, and create massive value for customers, employees, and investors. When the market conditions are right, you should blitzscale for the benefit of all stakeholders: customers, employees, investors, and society.

Cofounder 28

Cofounder Business Model IPO Non-Compete 28

Scalable Startup

DECEMBER 14, 2012

When you’re the CEO of a startup, a real startup with product and some cash in the bank and/or revenue, there are 3 FULL TIME JOBS. Raising Money – you are constantly doing this, preparing for this and thinking about this, whether it’s pre-seed, seed funding, debt, revenue, partnerships, IPO or other.

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IPO Revenue Employee Sales 27

Seeing Both Sides

SEPTEMBER 15, 2015

This post was co-authored with Omri Stern and originally appeared in Harvard Business Review. In 2014, for example, 18 IPOs raised a record-breaking $9.8 To answer these questions, we built a database of 112 Israeli companies founded between 1996 and 2013 that have met or exceeded $20 million in revenue. billion in 2013.

Cofounder 20

Cofounder Technical Review United States 20

Austin Startup

OCTOBER 6, 2018

My talk was about the 7 lessons I’ve learned on the journey from founder to CEO. I started off my talk emphasizing that the journey matters most in your transformation from founder to CEO. To prepare for our IPO at Bazaarvoice, I leveraged three additional coaches?—?one investors, employees, clients, and partners.

Founder 51

Founder Cofounder Software Review San Francisco 51

VC Cafe

MARCH 28, 2011

When asked why they’ve turned it down, Giora (Gig) Kaplan, one of Wix’s founders replied that his vision is to do a revolution and go where Israeli startups haven’t go before – grow a large company. Wix currently has 185 employees and plans to recruit an additional 100 in 2011. Potentially an IPO in 2012.

Flash 142

Flash IPO HTML 142

online.wsj.com

SEPTEMBER 23, 2012

If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail, based on Mr. Ghoshs research. Consider Daniel Dreymann, a founder of Goodmail Systems Inc., Less than 1% are currently in IPO registration.

Venture Capital 107

Venture Capital Software Review Rhode Island North Dakota 107

Agile VC

JUNE 17, 2015

My first startup job was as an early employee at PayPal, where I took a job at the end of ‘1999 and started a few months later in 2000. We were a profitable company at that point with nearly $200M annualized revenue, one of the first tech companies to IPO after the dot-com bubble.

Startup 188

Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 188

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief. Most people cant sustain more than a few of these iterations, and the founders rarely get to be involved in the later tries. In order to do this, we have our customer development team work hard to find a market, any market, for the product as currently specified.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2020

I've known Brian Chesky, Co-Founder, CEO and Head of Community at Airbnb for a long time. He also has strongly held ideas about structuring a company to institutionalize these intentions to make sure the next leader, future employees, and the next board will be true to that philosophy. 6,000, 7,000 employees.

Silicon Valley 60

Silicon Valley Hosting Cofounder Employee 60

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

we had no revenue. As a result, we knew that our pitch would need to steer into investors’ biggest concern: the lack of revenue. Instead, our strategy was to steer immediately into the revenue question because that was the top concern of investors in 2004. We made the mistake of listing three different revenue streams.

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Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 25, 2018

My first day at Bazaarvoice was just a few weeks later, on May 2, 2005, and we built a company from inception to IPO on around $12m of capital use (out of the $24m we raised) in 7 years, creating over a thousand jobs and impacting clients all over the world?—?starting Still in business today and run by my co-founder.

Bootstrapping 48

Bootstrapping Austin Equity Cofounder 48

www.mint.com

MARCH 9, 2010

If the answer to the question centers around “We will achieve revenue soon so our net will improve and give us more runway,” it means the company is in trouble because no product ever ships on time nor achieves the company’s “conservative forecast.” These days revenue is the best source of capital. Who is on your board of directors?

Software Review 68

Software Review Startup Post-Money Valuation Technical Review 68

Cracking the Code

OCTOBER 13, 2020

- This article was co-authored with my colleagues Varun Purandare and Candice du Fretay and published initially on Tech.eu. The average revenue multiple is now 17x+, close to 10 times higher than during the 2008 crisis! On the IPO front, the one word that comes to mind is “supersize”. billion of combined funding.

Europe 71

Europe Cloud Silicon Valley 71

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 9, 2011

Extremely important for companies to plan their IPOs during a “strategic window” that will increase their odds of success. Going public is not easy : companies should be preparing for IPO in terms of media communication and internal management over a year ahead of IPO. October 2011 was the worst month for IPOs since 2008.

IPO 92

IPO Cofounder Europe 92

Reid Hoffman

JUNE 8, 2021

While many travel industry leaders chose to “go dark,” as Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky put it , while they decided how to navigate next steps, Chesky took a different approach: He got candid. Today, we are thrilled to have Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky with us.

Silicon Valley 69

Silicon Valley Hosting Rhode Island Design 69

View from Seed

JUNE 17, 2015

My first startup job was as an early employee at PayPal, where I took a job at the end of ‘1999 and started a few months later in 2000. We were a profitable company at that point with nearly $200M annualized revenue, one of the first tech companies to IPO after the dot-com bubble.

Startup 120

Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

Over breakfast he got me up to date on his life since school (two non-CEO roles in startups,) but he wanted to talk about his third startup – the one he and two co-founders had started. We’re at 70 people, and we’ll do $40 million in revenue this year and should get to cash flow breakeven this quarter. ”

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Startup Lean Venture Capital Advisory Board 120

infochachkie.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

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. If a consultant claims they can enhance your marketing efforts, pay them based on their direct impact on your incremental sales.

Equity 40

Equity Silicon Valley Cofounder Technical Review 40

Haystack

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

Khosla Ventures has quietly been on a roll over the past few years, most recently with Square (a monster, monster return, assuming they held post-IPO) and Guardant, among others; and they old early shares in Instacart, DoorDash, OpenDoor, and many winners in the most recent unicorn crop.

Acquisition 62

Acquisition Artificial Inteligence Balance Sheet Cofounder 62

Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 4, 2008

2007 was a turning point for the SaaS industry with the successful IPOs of NetSuite, SuccessFactors, DemandTec, Salary.com, Aprimo and Constant Contact. The 23rd started with a quick overview of the achievement of our Software and SaaS portfolio in 2007 presented by Byron Deeter, the co-head of our West Coast SaaS practice.

Software Review 48

Software Review South Korea IPO Portfolio 48

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.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley San Francisco San Jose Startup 185

Agile VC

JUNE 17, 2015

My first startup job was as an early employee at PayPal, where I took a job at the end of ‘1999 and started a few months later in 2000. We were a profitable company at that point with nearly $200M annualized revenue, one of the first tech companies to IPO after the dot-com bubble.

Startup 100

Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 100

www.paulgraham.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

And since a startup thatsucceeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies gettingrich is doable too. A lot ofwould-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is theinitial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute.Venture capitalists know better. Ideally you want between two and four founders.

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Startup Cofounder Software Stock 105

Rob Go

APRIL 13, 2015

We ended the trek chatting with Paul English, the co-founder of Kayak at his venture foundry Blade. When Kayak went public, the company had one of the highest revenue/employee ratios of any business. Lending Club: IPO Market Cap: $8.4B, Revenue: $98M (2013), Employees: 628 (2014), Rev / Employee: $156K.

Technology 28

Technology IPO Boston Cofounder 28

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). The key is to be able to refute as many major hypotheses as you can.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

For example, I often cite a real example of a problem that has as its root cause a new employee who was not properly trained. I pick that example on purpose, for two reasons: 1) most of the companies I work with deal with this problem and yet 2) almost none of them have any kind of training program in place for new employees.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Cracking the Code

SEPTEMBER 20, 2016

Accel Euroscape: The 100 most promising Software-as-a- Service companies in Europe and Israel -This article was co-authored with my colleague Pia d'Iribarne and published initially on Tech.eu. To date, there have been only four major European SaaS exits (all IPOs), including QlikTech in 2010, Wix in 2013, Zendesk in 2014 and Mimecast in 2015.

Europe 48

Europe Artificial Inteligence Vertical 48