Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

On top of all this it was considered very bad form not to have at least four additional consecutive quarters of profits after an IPO.) In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

Silicon Valley 235

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

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? This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. Every board meeting, the metrics of success change.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

BeyondVC

APRIL 4, 2018

Look at the Dropbox IPO which priced above its initial value and came out white hot at the end of one of the worst weeks in stock market performance. There will also still be some amazing companies that raise their Series C, D and beyond funding rounds with scaling metrics.

Cloud 60

Cloud Agile Architecture Azure 60

NZ Entrepreneur

SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

experiments to build a product, find customers, test business models and hire amazing people. It is not uncommon for startup directors to be more deeply involved in the operations of the business when the company is entering a new market, hiring critical team members or raising capital. Underpinning this growth is good governance.

Technical Review 88

Technical Review Software Review New Zealand Due Diligence 88

Mucker Lab

OCTOBER 12, 2016

Why should a public market downturn determine an investment in a startup that has seven to 10 years to go before it can even think about an IPO? But many of today’s billion dollar venture firms invest in four-person startups as well as pre-IPO startups with thousands of employees. The winners will chart their own path.

Harvest 60

Harvest Vertical IPO Early Stage 60

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

We operate at scale and speed unprecedented in human history.” * I first wrote about the changes to the Venture Capital ecosystem 10 years ago and this still serves as a good primer of how we arrived at 2011, a decade on from the Web 1.0 dot-com bonanza. How little we all knew how ironic that term would become but has nonetheless endured.

Pre-Money Valuation 471

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Venture Capital Early Stage 471

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 23, 2013

Marketo filed for IPO with impressive 80% year-over-year growth in 2012, with almost $60m in revenue. The mindset works like this: It costs a lot of money to land an enterprise customer. And: how many times do you run through that process and still lose the customer? So these costs are amortized over the customers you do land.

Business Model 335

Business Model .Net Revenue IPO 335

Agile VC

JUNE 5, 2011

So Groupon obviously filed their S-1 the other day to formally being the IPO process. Cumulative customers (unique buyers of Groupons): 15.8M (Q1 2011), 9.0M (2010), 0.4M (2009). IMO this is much ado about nothing, as any comptentent analyst can look at Groupon’s GAAP and non-GAAP metrics and get a good sense of the business.

North America 100

North America Chicago Boston Silicon Valley 100

View from Seed

MARCH 3, 2015

Ellie Mirman was the first marketer hired by the CMO of HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software startup that IPOed in 2014. NextView Ventures: Thinking back to before anyone knew HubSpot or the company was headed towards an IPO, where did you even start to market the company? Interestingly, HubSpot isn’t unique in this respect.

Marketing 120

Marketing Sales Cycle Startup CTO Hire 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 7, 2013

They’re using metrics that are often unworkable in the current business environment, causing growing businesses to look elsewhere for capital and increasingly towards alternative forms of financing. Case in point: It took Amazon six years to earn a dime, during which it consumed huge amounts of venture funding and issued an IPO.

Advisory Board 249

Advisory Board Entrepreneur Portland Oregon 249

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

That’s because many of our reports feed us vanity metrics: numbers that make us look good but don’t really help make decisions. Yet even among those who have access to good actionable metrics, I’ve noticed a phenomenon that prevents taking maximum advantage of data. Too much of this data is non- actionable.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. We finally settled on a $1.99 Setup a simple website.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

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). Hire a CEO to Go Public.

Founder 274

Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 274

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Customer development. The biggest source of cost/time advantage that all lean companies have is avoiding building features that customers dont want. For those interested in getting started with agile or customer development, I thought Id include a few links. Agile allows companies to build higher quality software faster.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

That mission critical customers wont accept new releases on a continuous basis. Most customers of most products hate new releases. So asking customers if theyd like to receive new releases more often usually leads to a consistent answer: "No, thank you." Implicit in these concerns are two beliefs: 1. Lets take each in turn.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

One team is in charge of carrying out the vision as currently specified, and one team is constantly asking the skeptical questions: who is the customer? One team is in charge of carrying out the vision as currently specified, and one team is constantly asking the skeptical questions: who is the customer?

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

The Equity Kicker

OCTOBER 8, 2012

According to Paul most startups should look at revenue growth, but active users is a good proxy for companies that aren’t charging their customers (yet). Growth is the main driver of value in our companies and it is what makes them exciting to IPO investors and acquirers. If you can hit 10% a week you’re doing exceptionally well.

Silicon Valley 149

Silicon Valley IPO eCommerce Valuation 149

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

This is another sub-optimization caused by incentivizing the wrong metric. For example, lets say you dont have an operations team, and so youre still getting paged late at night when servers crash. Is it time to make your first operations hire? This is a variant of the time-quality-money fallacy , and it is not necessarily true.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Small batches reduce overhead.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

500hats.com

AUGUST 2, 2012

Mega VC has focused on the challenges of the post-SarbOx IPO market in the US, and has discovered opportunity in offering larger amounts of growth capital ($10-100M+) to private companies with reduced access to public markets. They are operators, through and through. Investing in Non-Investment: The “FULL SERVICE” VC.

Silicon Valley 74

Silicon Valley Early Stage Venture Capital Valuation 74

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Indeed the first thing I thought when I read the first paragraphs that the product manager was operating in a white tower and that the developers felt disenfranchised. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? This post has been removed by the author. Nice write-up.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

This is going to be BIG.

MAY 26, 2022

You’d like to believe the world is completely meritocratic—that you’ll put your heads down to work on your company, hit all your metrics, and just show up on the doorstep of a VC firm who will just be bowled over at the fantastic little company you’ve created. Unfortunately, this has real consequences for founders.

Founder 103

Founder .Net Term Sheet Aggregator 103

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

If we accept the verdict of customers instead of pundits, I think these claims are easy to dismiss. For example, imagine a team operating in a traditional waterfall development system, without continuous deployment, test-driven development, or continuous integration. Another is used by marketing to refer to what customers see.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web. Recently, he was bitten by the lean startup bug and has started writing about his experiences attempting to apply lean startup and customer development principles. On the one hand, this is the ultimate in customer responsiveness.

Continuous Deployment 151

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Of course, its possible that after the product is shipped and customer feedback is solicited, the next product design might be different. When it becomes possible to build products "live" with customers, the cycle time changes and design becomes a much more dynamic process. At no point is the overall purpose of the design changing.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

At Toyota , they are called Chief Engineer : Toyota realizes that the Chief Engineer job is probably the most important one in the company because the Chief Engineer listens to the customer and then determines what the functions need to do to address the customer’s desires. What is customer development?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

BeyondVC

NOVEMBER 17, 2006

I am not sure if you saw the news , but Salary.com recently filed for an IPO to raise up to $50 million. During the years ended March 31, 2004, 2005 and 2006, we achieved positive operating cash flows of $0.3 During these periods, we have consistently incurred operating losses, including $0.8 million, $0.9 million and $1.8

IPO 60

IPO Investment Bankers Demand Revenue 60

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Ive previously written about the advantages of having a pathetically small number of customers , and how to get started with customer segmentation. it seemed time to return to the subject of investigating who my customers are. Thats a common pattern to gaining customer insight. Customer knows they have a problem.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product. Unfortunately, we made two critically flawed assumptions: that customers would primarily consume first-party assets that we shipped to them on CD and that they would tend to congregate in a relatively uniform way. How likely will customers ultimately use that feature?

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

ReadWriteStart

APRIL 26, 2012

There used to be the Four Horsemen of the IPO world, back in the '80s and '90s. They all went away; they got rolled up in 1999 and 2000 into these too-big-to-fail banking operations," Davidson tells us. When they exited the scene, the small IPO market followed suit. Brown & Sons, Montgomery Securities. The question is why?

IPO 115

IPO Stock San Francisco Lean 115

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 2, 2018

At the other extreme, I don’t condone greedy and unethical business practices to unjustly shake down customers and employees alike. Shows positive value for both the customer and the business. Customers and investors are looking for quantifiable specifics, not just social value or “eco-friendly.”

Intellectual Property 48

Intellectual Property Initial Public Offering Merger Acquisition 48

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

To do that they need to understand value, communicate with other business people (like bankers and VCs) about value, and communicate with prospective customers about value. these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Cracking the Code

JANUARY 19, 2016

From then on, I remained convinced that SaaS was a much more efficient model, for both ISVs and customers — although many people remained skeptical on the viability of the model for a long time. They also need VCs capable of financing their entire life cycle — on average, SaaS startups raise between $80 and $100 million before an IPO.

API 48

API Silicon Valley Europe Differentiation 48

K9 Ventures

APRIL 9, 2014

Yes, almost everyone who was operating as a Super Angel, went on to raise a venture fund. Threshold for an IPO is higher Ten years ago, if you had $20M in revenue you were ready to go public. They’re starting to use similar metrics and structures as what the old Series A folks used to. Series C/D is the new Mezzanine.

Mezzanine 134

Mezzanine Seed Stage Early Stage IPO 134