YoungUpstarts

JUNE 1, 2019

by Bruce Cleveland, Founding Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners and author of “ Traversing the Traction Gap “. In the first post , we drilled down into the often-overlooked notion of “market-engineering” and why it’s so critical. As you develop your product, you must concurrently invest in market-engineering tasks.

Cleveland 150

Cleveland Framework Marketing Early Stage 150

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

It occurred to me that although we mentioned our new thematic approach when we raised our last fund in 2017, we haven’t really shared a broader manifesto about how we are approaching the early stage market. It’s been an interesting several years in the early stage venture eco-system, and the sands have shifted considerably.

North America 120

North America Seed Stage Early Stage Lead Investor 120

View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

Or, if you can’t skip a round, when should you try to work extra hard to minimize dilution and when should you be prepared to take more dilution for the right partner/situation? Also, the benefit of raising a pre-seed from great partners probably outweighs the cost. Founders with limited experience. Experienced founders: Consumer.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 15, 2022

It provides the freedom to partner with entrepreneurs and reduce the costs of agency work in exchange for equity in their startup. Today’s Talented Engineers & Designers Need Top-Shelf Tools of the Trade. This outside work provides a valuable source of revenue able to be used to fund operations.

Incubator 188

Incubator Startup Software Developers Software Development 188

The Startup Magazine

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

While the rewards may be a boon to their company in the short term, the consequences of accepting outside funding too early can be debilitating. There’s a reason why I refer to early-stage VC funding as vulture capital, and to be honest it’s pretty accurate. Money in Exchange for Control.

Early Stage 85

Early Stage Venture Capital Bootstrapping Pre-Money Valuation 85

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

The functions of an early-stage board are pretty obvious and well understood: Providing introductions to customers, biz dev partners, recruits, the press, other investors, etc. Offering a sparring-partner function on strategic decisions. how much energy to put into channel partners vs. direct sales.

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

View from Seed

APRIL 27, 2020

Trying to be transparent has always been a core value of NextView, and we hope that this will help founders and our co-investors better understand how we intend to operate in the early stage ecosystem in the next several years. . We look forward to partnering together to make that happen. Number of Investments.

Cofounder 194

Cofounder Software Review Portfolio Technical Review 194

YoungUpstarts

MAY 21, 2020

by Nick Frandsen, co-founder and managing partner at Dovetail. In doing so, it then ensures you will deliver an MVP that not only captures your market but saves you time and money in the long run by not building features that don’t appeal to your target customer or are not necessary for early-stage launch. It’s genius!

Product 264

Product Cofounder Audience Product Development 264

www.bothsidesofthetable.com

MAY 13, 2012

Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? This time I thought I’d try and address engineering talent. Often I’m asked by startup CEO’s about how to best build an engineering team. The VP Engineering aspires to manage teams. Raising Venture Capital. Angel Topics. Entrepreneur DNA.

Fractional VPE 89

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Fractional CTO CTO Hire 89

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

Understanding where your VC partner sits in their respective fund and where their fund is in the cycle of its investment lifecycle will help you understand your VCs behavior. Growth like this, this early in a company’s lifecycle rarely happens. What Rob wrote in his post is right. In his spare time he raised nearly $30 million.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 27, 2013

I am super excited to announce that today is a day of lots of new things for my partners & me: A new fund, a new office and a new brand. Santa Monica is the place where the highest concentration of early-stage startups are created if you consider also the contiguous geography of Venice Beach. What’s up with that?

Los Angeles 343

Los Angeles Las Vegas San Francisco Baltimore 343

SoCal CTO

APRIL 18, 2012

Todd Gitlin of Safire Partners - a go to resource here in LA for recruiting C-level positions at startups - was nice enough to compile some data again this year (see last year's Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data ). What I had not realized is that this had translated into escalating salaries for CTOs and VP Engineering. It has not.

CTO Hire 294

CTO Hire Salary Equity Los Angeles 294

Steve Blank

JUNE 19, 2014

After seeing the process work so well for scientists and engineers in the NSF, we hypothesized that we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently. if enough knowledge was gathered through proxies or research a positive outcome could be precomputed.

Lean 269

Lean SBIR Intellectual Property Customer Development 269

YoungUpstarts

MAY 7, 2019

If followed, we believe it can help startup teams navigate the critical early stages of development – and avoid joining a majority of early stage companies that end up on the entrepreneurial scrap heap. Read on to discover why successfully traversing the Traction Gap is critical to early stage companies.

Cleveland 217

Cleveland Early Stage Framework Startup 217

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

Max entered Stanford in the fall of 2010 as a freshman, took as many of the engineering entrepreneurship classes as he could and independent study with me. (He Max and his partners interviewed and analyzed over 650 early-stage Internet startups. I was feeling pretty old. Max set the record for smarts divided by age.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

(co-written with Jamie Finney, Founding Partner at Greater Colorado Venture Fund. Similar to the explosion of seed funds in the past decade, we (and some limited partners too ) believe these Flexible VCs are on the forefront of what will become a major segment of the venture ecosystem. Of the Inc. 5000 companies, only 6.5% return cap.

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 16, 2015

by John Vrionis, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. The goal was to set quantifiable metrics to hit in each category and to reverse engineer how many people and dollars would be required to get there. Then they broke each category down into six-week sprints. Then they broke each category down into six-week sprints.

Valuation 100

Valuation Dilution Chicago Technical Review 100

VC Cafe

AUGUST 2, 2022

As an early stage investor in the world of gaming and metaverse technology at Remagine Ventures, I find these companies have the potential to set the agenda, become the potential platforms for developers building in this space and future acquirers/consolidators of startups building the next generation of the Internet.

IP 206

IP Cofounder Valuation Acquisition 206

SiliconHills

JUNE 18, 2018

Morgan Flager, a general partner of Silverton Partners, one of Austin’s oldest home-grown VC firms, is an active investor in early-stage technology startups in Austin. The post Morgan Flager, General Partner with Silverton Partners, on How the Firm Picks Investments appeared first on SiliconHills.

Partner 79

Partner Early Stage Austin Engineer 79

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 13, 2011

I think you have to listen to the queue’s.” “…if you look at a lot of the early stage investors, whether it be Union Square Ventures or First Round or Jeff Clavier at Softtech or Dave McClure – we want to try the product, we want to experience the product, we want to get a sense of how the entrepreneur is thinking about it.

Technical Review 288

Technical Review Venture Capital Silicon Valley Software Review 288

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

My colleagues Sebastian Soler , Steven Greenberg and I recently launched a new online community, PEVCTech.com , exclusively for PE/VC investors; engineers who work at PE/VC funds; and other technologists who specialize in working on this problem. Greylock Partners. You can register for the survey here. VC Firm. $ Tech % of workforce.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. You don’t have a clue about what the purpose of marketing is because all you are doing is giving engineering a list of feature requests and executing a series of tasks like they’re like a big To Do list.

Business Model 305

Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 305

ConversionXL

MARCH 31, 2021

For example, if organic traffic is a priority for you, include a statement like this: From an SEO perspective, our primary goal in the early stages of this content strategy is to focus on low-volume, high-buyer intent keywords and queries related to specific pain points. This sets the intention for your early-stage priorities.

Audience 127

Audience Non-Compete Distribution Channel 127

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2015

So that we’re speaking the same language I would define “exclusive” as a period in which your company is prohibited from doing business with certain customers or business partners, which is why many incorrectly assume this is necessarily bad. Why Exclusivity Matters to Your Customers or Business Development Partners.

PR 150

PR Early Stage Software Naming 150

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 12, 2011

He and I once took different sides of an debate about whether “VC signaling&# in early-stage deals is a serious problem or not. This week I sat down with Chris Dixon, co-founder / CEO of Hunch and Partner at Founder Collective in the most recent installment of This Week in Venture Capital.

Technical Review 281

Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Cofounder API 281

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 12, 2010

One of the biggest mistakes I see early-stage startups making is hiring “seasoned&# sales professionals or hiring people too senior, too early. The problem is that in an early stage business there probably isn’t a perfect fit between your early product and a customer’s needs.

Hiring 346

Hiring Sales Startup Early Stage 346

Mucker Lab

MAY 28, 2020

This post originally appeared in TechCrunch back in 2015, written by our co-founder and managing partner Erik Rannala. Until you have product-market fit, hire builders: engineers, designers, and growth and product people. We believe the message applies as much today as it did in 2015 when it was published. --.

Startup 78

Startup Cofounder Burn Rate Technical Review 78

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 25, 2012

After bootstrapping, friends and family are the most common funding sources for early-stage startups. Exchanging equity for services is worth negotiating with legal counsel, accountants, engineers, and even sales people. Partner with distributor or beneficiary. Friends and family.

Technical Review 257

Technical Review Bootstrapping Venture Capital Incubator 257

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2018

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Greylock Partners will be talking about “blitzscaling” with his co-author Chris Yeh, and Stanford Professor Bob Sutton. It’s the engine that has powered companies including Amazon, Alibaba, and Google. You need the right tools.

Lean 103

Lean Las Vegas Cofounder Startup 103

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

What I love about my job is getting to see teams of super-early-stage companies develop ideas that while raw have potential to make an impact on the market. We are growing faster than at any time in the company’s history (which is a testament to sales, market, product, engineering and of course the founder & ceo!)

Operations 150

Operations Metrics Early Stage Non-Compete 150

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 26, 2010

I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies. However, I’ve now begun questioning how and what an early-stage / startup CTO should be. It makes this early stage challenging.

CTO 225

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 225

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 31, 2022

As a mentor for aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs, I talk to a fair number who may have a great vision and a strong engineering background, but have a negative interest in the role of public speaking in business. Need to represent your company at industry association events.

Marketing 283

Marketing Early Stage Lead Generation Hosting 283

David Teten

MARCH 14, 2018

My Partners at HOF Capital are younger than I am, which means that we have a half-century horizon for the franchise we are building. – Build out low-cost force multipliers such as scouts , Advisors, Entrepreneurs in Residence, Venture Partners, and so on. So we think about scaling a lot.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Cofounder 60

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 27, 2012

I’ve had this conversation with several communities such as in San Diego where I believe there are way more qualified and talented engineers than available local capital to support them. If you’re working with early-stage companies you need to be spending quality time with them which means you need to be nearby.

Community 378

Community San Diego Silicon Valley Los Angeles 378

View from Seed

JULY 21, 2022

For creatives, we’re a premium, value-aligned partner to help grow their networks and portfolios, and monetize their passions. RH: What’s your favorite thing about being an early-stage founder? EP: Getting to live in the mindset that everything is “figure-outable” has by far been my favorite part of being an early-stage founder.

Early Stage 156

Early Stage San Francisco Michigan Portfolio 156

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 16, 2011

After bootstrapping, friends and family are the most common funding sources for early-stage startups. Exchanging equity for services is worth negotiating with legal counsel, accountants, engineers, and even sales people. Partner with distributor or beneficiary. Friends and family.

Technical Review 233

Technical Review Bootstrapping Startup Venture Capital 233

NZ Entrepreneur

MAY 27, 2019

In my opinion, founders or early stage companies should only have a team of two or three people. It’s a common issue – you have an idea that will require some technical know-how (eg coding, engineering, science) but don’t have those skills yourself. If you’re scared about giving up on control or equity, then read on.

Technical Cofounder 64

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 64