View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

As seed rounds have atomized, it’s not uncommon for founders to raise 3 or even 4 rounds prior to a series A. The reality is that if a founder raised every one of these rounds, and lead investors always got their “target” ownership, the level of dilution would be ridiculous. Founders with limited experience. should be avoided.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

I just had lunch (at my favorite Greek restaurant in Palo Alto forgetting it looked like a VC meetup) with a friend who was technical founder of his company and is now its chairman. As we’ve grown we’ve become less and less responsive to changing market and customer needs. It Seems Logical. Who Wants to Work on The Old Product.

Part-Time VPE 318

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work. Arguments that I had heard at my own startups seem to be repeated at others.

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

So if you’re the founder of a startup, you may want to consider who you take money from. Is Your VC Founder Friendly? Do they “get&# Customer Development ? How many of their founders are still with their company? How many of their founders are still with their company? Do They Get Customer Development?

Founder 231

Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 231

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

And know that just because a venture failed doesn’t mean that you’re a failure. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Will Zell , co-founder and CEO of Nikola Labs wireless power company.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

The Founder’s New Insight Smart founders are never satisfied with simply executing their current business model, they are constantly observing, orienting and deciding whether their current business model can be made better. But the purpose of this post is what happens when a founder (or large company CEO) finds a better business model.

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

A first order filter is whether the founders are aiming for a scalable startup. Now with customers and early revenue, it was out raising its first round of venture money. In fact, Google’s offer for $15 Million was equal to the highest valuation from the venture firms. One founder quit and joined Google.)

Hockey Stick 276

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 276

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

on medical device revenues, regardless of profitability delays or cash-flow breakeven. Venture Capital Issues. Early stage Venture Capital for medical device startups has dried up. The amount of capital being invested in new device companies is at an 11 year low. Venture Capital.

Startup 294

Startup Venture Capital Lean IPO 294

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. Here’s why.

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Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 297

SoCal CTO

JULY 13, 2011

This site aggregates and filters content from thought leaders who talk about topics such as Marketing , Sales , Design , Revenue , Hiring , Social Media , Business Models , Metrics , PR , Venture Capital , Angel Investors , Bootstrapping , Incubators , Agile and many others.

Intellectual Property 175

Intellectual Property Aggregator Startup IP 175

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

But then, because there might be entrenched competitors and your concept is radically new, you still need to invest in the customer development process to learn how to get design wins from companies who may be happy with their existing vendors. These two numbers have direct impact on revenue and financial health.

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. With Netscape’s IPO , there was suddenly a public market for companies with limited revenue and no profit.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

How founders cope with startup challenges was the focus of today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. I started working with startups and venture capitalists.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

In hindsight it appeared clear that startups that survive the first few tough years do not follow the traditional product-centric launch model espoused by product managers or the venture capital community. Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 127

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

We Changed Our Mind In 1966, 10 years after Hewlett’s memo, Hewlett Packard’s revenue and headcount had grown ten fold; $200 million and 11,000 employees – all from test and measurement equipment. And venture capital and entrepreneurship has made life even tougher for the modern corporation.

Silicon Valley 164

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 164

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals. What happened to him? Who was he?

Silicon Valley 156

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

Corner Cases and Consensus are For Large Companies Carefully considering each and every possible outcome before you proceed with a decision is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do. Customer Development.) They are about forward motion, momentum and feedback loops (i.e. Order Here.

Silicon Valley 176

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 176

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers - SoCal CTO , November 1, 2010 I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ? What went wrong?

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Spencer Fry

APRIL 17, 2017

Having started and sold 3 successful bootstrapped businesses, and am now running 1 venture capital backed business ( Coach ), this is a topic I know a thing or two about. As a bootstrapped startup, the only accountability you have is to yourself and to your co-founder if you have one. The quality bar has never been higher.

Bootstrapping 63

Bootstrapping Cap Table Liquidation Preference Cofounder 63

www.instigatorblog.com

MARCH 2, 2010

The Board probably existed beforehand, but was made up only of the founders. Venture capital firms like to see CEOs with strong support (beyond the Board of Directors) and that’s what the Advisory Board is there to do. As such, advisory board members will often become customers or help you find customers.

Advisory Board 40

Advisory Board Startup Cofounder Equity 40

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2011

As time went on, I was a co-founder or member of the starting team for six high-tech startups…. As it turned out, rather than run me out of town on a rail, the two venture capital firms that had lost $12 million in my failed startup actually asked me to work with them. To be honest, I would have gladly done so.

Philadelphia 335

Philadelphia Miami Thailand Silicon Valley 335

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

I’ve seen a range of options for supporting entrepreneurs, which I can rank from least to most involvement in companies by investors: financier VCs, e.g., Correlation Ventures. portfolio operator VCs, e.g., Andreessen Horowitz, ff Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Google Ventures. mentor VCs, e.g., most VCs.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

ReadWriteStart

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

Well, it turns out that to port long tail productivity apps to Google's App Engine is a somewhat cumbersome job, and requires a lot of custom development. The long tail apps can easily be ported to or developed on Google App Engine in a third of the time and cost using OrangeScape as an application platform. Enter OrangeScape.

Entrepreneur 114

Entrepreneur India Silicon Valley Massachusetts 114

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

We faced this same problem in entrepreneurship and venture capital, but we are getting past it. Seed-stage investors are learning the metrics of traction, and are getting better at identifying those companies that are really achieving validated learning about customers. What is the right revenue model?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2013

The test is: If you add one more sales person or spend more marketing dollars, does your sales revenue go up by more than your expenses? Does our product or service solve a customer problem (product-market fit)? How do we attract, keep and grow customers? What are revenue strategy and pricing tactics? What is an IRR?

Venture Capital 333

Venture Capital IRR Liquidity Event Business Model 333

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

What CEOs, management teams and shareholders care about is growth —revenue growth, greater user adoption, increased market share, bigger margins, etc. in developing these new models. It only emerges after an intense business model design and search activity based on the customer development process.

Lean 326

Lean Nepal Cofounder Customer Development 326

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2013

The test is: If you add one more sales person or spend more marketing dollars, does your sales revenue go up by more than your expenses? Does our product or service solve a customer problem (product-market fit)? How do we attract, keep and grow customers? What are revenue strategy and pricing tactics? What is an IRR?

Venture Capital 225

Venture Capital IRR Liquidity Event Business Model 225

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Page views drive his ad revenue, which is probably CPM based. He spoke at the Founder Institute last week, and his advice was to not hire a PR agency until there were so many inbound requests that you can’t handle them yourself. He prefers to interact directly with the founders of a startup.

Silicon Valley 184

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 184

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster. They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. I first did it for the founder.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

This is going to be BIG.

SEPTEMBER 21, 2010

If you’re a non-technical founder, while your team is building and refining your product, you’ve got to figure out what to do with your time. It’s the kind of thing you can repeat in an elevator, simple to understand , universally applicable , and, most importantly, doesn’t burden your tech team with a lot of custom development.

Early Stage 120

Early Stage Developer Technical Review Widget 120

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. I think I just really feared working for the Man.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84