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What Happens When Startups Turn from Their Innovation Stage to Operational Excellence?

Both Sides of the Table

Nearly every successful tech startup I’ve observed over the past 20 years has gone through a similar growth pattern: Innovate, systematize then scale operations. I will always remember fondly my coffee meeting 5 years ago with my friend Sam Rosen in New York City shortly after Hurricane Sandy.

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Why the Future of Tesla May Depend on Knowing What Happened to Billy Durant

Steve Blank

Sloan Foundation , the Sloan School of Management at MIT , the Sloan program at Stanford , and the Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. Each of these GM divisions focused on its own day-to-day operations with each division general manager responsible for the division’s profit and loss. There’s the Alfred P.

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Flexible VC, a New Model for Companies Targeting Profitability

David Teten

(co-written with Jamie Finney, Founding Partner at Greater Colorado Venture Fund. From RBI, Flexible VCs borrow the ability to reap meaningful returns without demanding founders build for an exit. By tying payments to actual revenues, founders and investors remain aligned around the company’s real-time performance, good or bad.

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Flexible VCs With Structures Between Equity and Revenue-Based Investing

David Teten

(co-written with Jamie Finney, Founding Partner at Greater Colorado Venture Fund. This essay is part of a series on alternative VC: I: Revenue-Based Investing: a new option for founders who care about control. III: Why are Revenue-Based VCs investing in so many women and underrepresented founders?

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Innovation, Change and the Rest of Your Life

Steve Blank

The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. It turns out the term “visionary founder” was usually a synonym for someone who was hallucinating. Founders Need to Run the Company Longer. And while new markets were created (i.e. What we’re now seeing is The Democratization of Entrepreneurship.

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How to Scale a Venture Capital (or Private Equity) Fund

David Teten

Managers of VC funds typically want to grow their business aggressively, just like the founders we back. I’ve listed them below in *very* roughly descending order of efficiency, measured by increased dollars one can put to work, divided by the operational dollars required to implement each strategy. .

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Who are the Major Revenue-Based Investing VCs?

David Teten

I’ve been a traditional equity VC for 8 years, and I’m now researching new business models in venture capital. RBI normally requires founders to pay back their investors with a fixed percentage of revenue until they have finished providing the investor with a fixed return on capital, which they agree upon in advance. Bigfoot Capital.

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