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Praying to the God of Valuation

Both Sides of the Table

Sure, we built SaaS products before the term even existed but at 31 it was hard to delineate reality from what all of the monied people around us were telling us what we were worth. In those years I learned to properly build product, price products, sell products and serve customers. Until we weren’t.

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Cliff Notes S-1: Kayak ? AGILEVC

Agile VC

Kayak was started here in my backyard of Boston… co-founder & CTO Paul English and the product/engineering team is based here in Concord MA. paying for travel data from ITA or others (customers acquisition spend is not included in COGS). 5) High Productivity: Kayak had 148 employees at the end of 2010.

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What Founders Need to Know: You Were Funded for a Liquidity Event – Start Looking

Steve Blank

But startups require money upfront for product development and later to scale. For the first few years, your VCs want you to keep your head down, build the product, find product/market fit and ship to get to some inflection point (revenue, users, etc.). Congratulations, welcome to Customer Discovery. ——-.

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Some Career Advice for Aspiring Tech CEOs

Both Sides of the Table

Even when you do sign-up initial customers it’s still not clear that your company will be a success and you’re still likely paying yourself under market rates. But if you’re the Director or Product or VP of Marketing – you don’t get to make that decision. the standard 4-6% for a hired-gun CEO).

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Thinking big and doing stuff properly

The Equity Kicker

That’s exciting and motivating for founders, and makes it easier to enlist support for your mission from investors, new employees and customers and will get you talked about on blogs and at cocktail parties. Much like Apple has worked on every element of the customer experience from retail stores to packaging (with the exception of iTunes….)

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Should Founders Be Allowed to Take Money off the Table?

Both Sides of the Table

I took money with a 3x participating preferred liquidation preference with 8% compounded interest annually. Coupled with my participating preferred from 1999 and 2000 I had more than $55 million of liquidation preferences. In my first company I had to raise money in April 2001 or die.

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Twitter Link Roundup #215 – Small Business, Startups, Innovation, Social Media, Design, Marketing and More

crowdSPRING Blog

9 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Their Customers – crowdspring.co/1loBthB. Good read for entrepreneurs & startup employees on liquidation preferences – crowdspring.co/1neVvzy. 9 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Their Customers – crowdspring.co/1loBthB. Thinking about buying some online ads?