Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 14, 2022

For early-stage startups, the goodwill component can easily exceed the size of all the financial elements together, or can just as easily mark a company with good financials as not investable. For startups, the entrepreneur and founder is almost always the face of the company.

Technical Review 323

Technical Review Due Diligence Valuation Leadership 323

SoCal CTO

AUGUST 4, 2011

Almost every day I'm talking to early stage startup founders (see Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions ) about what they plan to do. Many of these founders have talked with several developers or development firms about their plans. What are your key Startup Metrics ? Who are the other stakeholders involved?

Developer 396

Developer Founder Viral Oauth 396

SoCal CTO

AUGUST 4, 2011

Almost every day I'm talking to early stage startup founders (see Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions ) about what they plan to do. Many of these founders have talked with several developers or development firms about their plans. What are your key Startup Metrics ? Who are the other stakeholders involved?

Developer 384

Developer Founder Viral Oauth 384

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 15, 2020

For early-stage startups, the goodwill component can easily exceed the size of all the financial elements together, or can just as easily mark a company with good financials as not investable. For startups, the entrepreneur and founder is almost always the face of the company.

Valuation 311

Valuation Technical Review Due Diligence Leadership 311

NZ Entrepreneur

AUGUST 4, 2021

That’s why it’s important for founders to understand that the clearer you can articulate the opportunity and its potential risks – and proposed mitigations – the better equipped investors will be to assess your business as a viable investment. The post A founders’ guide to capital raising appeared first on NZ Entrepreneur Magazine.

Technical Review 61

Technical Review Software Review Founder Due Diligence 61

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

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

One question that keeps coming up when speaking with early stage entrepreneurs when it comes to funding, is what metrics the company needs to hit to raise seed/series A/B etc: What’s a good conversion rate? Investors look beyond top line metrics to assess other important factors. What should our MRR growth be?

B2C 141

B2C Technical Review Startup Retention 141

Austin Startup

APRIL 4, 2017

I really enjoyed a recent post I read on First Round Review about vanity metrics, which touches on what I love about my startup vs. others with more funding, more engineers and more mentions on TechCrunch. Vanity metrics aren’t useless. Tracking clarity metrics builds great businesses.” “In Don’t focus on them internally.

Metrics 48

Metrics Silicon Valley Angel Investor Technical Review 48

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 2, 2022

I touched on this in my post “ Founder Investor Fit “ Passing the initial filtering process. Most of these can sound like common sense, but you’d be surprised how many founders skip this initial research. Stake – can the fund secure it’s minimum stake in the business?

Technical Review 166

Technical Review Early Stage Cofounder Portfolio 166

VC Cafe

JANUARY 14, 2022

Anecdotally, one founder complained to me that this has shorten his runway by 30%. Several discussions on social media have founders asking if they should hedge their FOREX risk. Plenty of fresh powder in the market across stages. Most expensive cost of living cities in the world (source: WEF ). Global tech correction.

Technical Review 158

Technical Review Lock-up Period South Korea 158

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 20, 2019

by Lu Zhang, founder and managing partner of Fusion Fund. Competition from other startups and established incumbents, constraints on time and capital, and limited access to talent and technology resources are just a few of the hurdles nearly every first-time founder faces while trying to build a business.

Technical Review 118

Technical Review Due Diligence Early Stage Differentiation 118

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 19, 2012

I was talking with an early-stage founder who has a product vision and wants to get it built. Founder : Ummm. Founder : Umm. So, I promised this founder to do a post talking about how you go about create specifications of your MVP. He is not a technical person, but is somewhat web savvy. what do you mean?

Developer 354

Developer Technical Review Fractional CTO Software Review 354

Austin Startup

MAY 19, 2018

As Bryan stated below, there are no shortage of “How to pitch” or “How to behave” articles by VCs but really very little advice for VCs by founders. Anyone notice there's a ton of VCs giving founder advice, and almost no founder advice for VCs? Lines Not Dots Raising money from a fund is a process, most founders get that.

Founder 75

Founder Early Stage Software Review Deal Flow 75

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 4, 2019

Most early stage startups tend to do well in this area because entrepreneurs generally launch their startups believing they have a great product idea. What does this mean for their early stage investors? Weak revenue architecture poses the greatest near-term risk of failure for most early stage startups.

Framework 118

Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 118

David Teten

AUGUST 19, 2019

Though RBI will displace some traditional equity VC, its much bigger impact will be to expand the pool of capital available for early-stage entrepreneurs. . However, only recently have early-stage companies started to use this model at any scale. . RBI structures help to protect the equity of both founders and investors.

Revenue 60

Revenue Term Sheet Founder Technical Review 60

SoCal CTO

MAY 21, 2012

Many of the factors are not obvious and include building mystery to drive margin, why boring B2B companies often win but are challenging in other ways, how bootstrapping wins, integrating metrics from the start and many other similar lessons. What parts Agile addresses and the big problems with Agile for early-stage startups?

Fractional CTO 175

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Startup Social Network 175

YoungUpstarts

MAY 24, 2019

Most early stage startups tend to do well in this area because entrepreneurs generally launch their startups believing they have a great product idea. What does this mean for their early stage investors? Weak revenue architecture poses the greatest near-term risk of failure for most early stage startups.

Framework 104

Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 104

David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

From RBI, Flexible VCs borrow the ability to reap meaningful returns without demanding founders build for an exit. Every Flexible VC structure allows founders to access immediate risk capital while preserving exit, growth trajectory, and ownership optionality. . Flexible VC 102: Variations.

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

Reid Hoffman

AUGUST 6, 2020

The term “early-stage” covers a lot of territory in venture investing, from incubating a brand-new idea, to investing in a Series A. WHAT METRICS SHOULD A FOUNDER SHOW TO RAISE A SERIES A FROM A VC FIRM LIKE GREYLOCK? Reid and I have both done Series A investments in companies that have no metrics to speak of.

Technical Review 69

Technical Review Seed Stage Software Review Early Stage 69

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

The email continued, &# The problem I’m working on is that many founders are either making uninformed decisions or inefficiently learning the new skills they need. The solution I’m exploring is a just in time learning methodology that accelerates founders’ learning curve by aggregating relevant content, peers and mentors.&#.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 1, 2019

In two of these three phases – the first and third – volumes of helpful information and numerous organizations are readily available to help guide and support founders of startups. These are the consultants and books that offer founders the tools and insights needed to “cross the chasm” ( as Geoffrey Moore put it ) and begin to scale.

Cleveland 127

Cleveland Marketing Framework Early Stage 127

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

As an early-stage VC I love this phase. Sam also had a vision as early as 2012 about how MakeSpace would be a large employer of middle-income jobs: The company would hire employees rather than just have contractors and he would lead the effort to ensure they had opportunities for growth and benefits for their families.

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

David Teten

DECEMBER 16, 2015

I review a lot of board decks with a beautifully hand-crafted page with metrics for the company. Good metrics are comparable across industries; comparative ; readily understandable; and help drive decisions. Comparative means that you can compare a metric across time periods, groups of users, or competitors. So how do you do it?

Metrics 60

Metrics Analytics Balance Sheet .Net 60

YoungUpstarts

MAY 30, 2019

Keeping this philosophy top of mind during the product management phase is crucial for early stage CTOs, especially when working through backlogs and other barriers that can undermine the user experience. Early stage CTOs often overlook predictability, but it’s a valuable asset in thwarting brewing internal conflicts.

Management 129

Management Product SCRUM Early Stage 129

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

The majority of the decline comes from much lower investment volumes in the growth stage, but also fewer companies getting funded in the early stages. If you’re a gaming founder, at the earliest stages, looking to raise money, below are a few tips to maximise your chances of success. Want to have a chat?

Founder 78

Founder Generative AI Early Stage Venture Capital 78

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. I’ll address the specifics of what this Founder Developer Gap looks like below.

CTO 225

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 225

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 27, 2011

There are very few people in Silicon Valley who have such a precise grasp on what defines success of early-stage startup companies than Eric Ries. Timecodes: 00:00 Welcome, our guest is Eric Ries, founder of the Lean Startup Movement. 48:30 Vanity metrics. 52:00 Actionable metrics. There are many in this episode.

Lean 301

Lean Silicon Valley Social Media PR 301

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2014

For all the things he’s likely known for, he probably hasn’t yet built a strong relationship as an early stage venture investor (he invests often in later-stage deals where he is very respected). VCs will spend over a year networking just to position around one founder or one deal, and if they lose it, it’s gone.”

Silicon Valley 333

Silicon Valley Early Stage Later Stage Technical Review 333

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. Clearly the founders and senior executives of a company are the most valuable resources and their time should be maximized on the most valuable tasks. HR & Legal.

Operations 150

Operations Metrics Early Stage Non-Compete 150

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 30, 2022

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. Managing business growth is more than metrics.

Mezzanine 368

Mezzanine Private Equity Bandwidth Metrics 368

Berkonomics

MARCH 7, 2024

Email readers, continue here…] Many early-stage founders and CEOs believe they can delegate design and creation of metrics, flash reports, analytical reports and more from their bookkeepers. And at some early stages, a bookkeeper can prepare such information. Why bother with this ?

Early Stage 62

Early Stage Flash Analytics Metrics 62

SoCal CTO

MARCH 1, 2010

Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs , February 2, 2010 Looks at the critical equation around customer acquisition cost vs. customer lifetime value similar to what I discussed in Startup Metrics but in more depth. This relates to another great post Freemium Founders: Start Charging for Things Today!

Acquisition 150

Acquisition Cofounder Technical Cofounder Cost 150

David Teten

MAY 20, 2016

Founders/C-suite executives at technology companies primarily focused on working with investors in private markets. Totem is a tool that centralizes all the data about our companies’ management, metrics, investment history, co-investors and cap table tracking. who use tech solutions in their day-to-day process.

Private Equity 113

Private Equity Equity Cap Table Venture Capital 113

YoungUpstarts

JULY 31, 2019

by Anish Sebastian and Juan Pablo Segura, co-founders of Babyscripts. Founders need seed capital to get their operations up and running, and to begin generating revenue. When founders are wrong (which happens often), that initial seed round runs out quickly, requiring another round of funding — typically referred to as a bridge round.

Cofounder 118

Cofounder Burn Rate Technical Cofounder Seed Capital 118

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 9, 2014

This is a guest post from Stephano Kim , former co-founder of Web 1.0 Many startup CEOs hire COOs or launch companies with a co-founder carrying the title. When should founders hire one? For most of my career, I’ve served startups and early-stage companies as an operating executive or advisor.

Hiring 336

Hiring Cofounder Startup Technical Cofounder 336

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 25, 2018

Today, Mark Attanasio gets to flex his full range of expertise and interests as co-founder and Managing Partner of Hillcrest Merchant Partners, a Toronto-based merchant bank focused on early stage and mid market growth companies. Study them through their websites and the business media to ensure a good match.

Partner 104

Partner Technical Review Management Due Diligence 104

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

They might be ideas they hatch internally (via a Foundry) or a founder who just left SpaceX and raises money to search for an idea. two founders in a garage?—?(HP The most connected and high-potential founders start with wads of cash. The biggest change for us in early-stage investing is that we now need to commit earlier.

Pre-Money Valuation 471

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Venture Capital Early Stage 471