Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2013

And at this early stage you’ll be giving up a larger percentage of your firm to investors. A seed round can come from friends, family, Kickstarter, angels – and most importantly, early customers. These sources are a lot more forgiving of iterations and pivots than later-stage venture-capital funds.

Venture Capital 333

Venture Capital IRR Liquidity Event Business Model 333

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2011

We had to buy Oracle database licenses, UNIX servers, a Sun Solaris operating system, web servers, load balancers, EMC storage, disk mirrors for redundancy and had to commit to a year-long hosting agreement at places such as Exodus. Linux (instead of UNIX), Apache (web server software), MySQL (instead of Oracle) and PHP.

Venture Capital 334

Venture Capital Software PHP Open Source 334

The Next Web

AUGUST 26, 2013

Before you start talking to large VCs, find some early stage investors. Stefan Tirtey, Partner at Doughty Hanson Ventures , created this document with Berlin early stage investors. These skills are hard to develop, many founders actually decide to hire a CEO at a later stage.

Management 120

Management Cofounder Startup Bootstrapping 120

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2010

Summit is a hugely respected firm in Silicon Valley and a long-term “institution&# but they’re better known as more of a “private equity&# investor meaning that they do later stage investments in much larger companies that are profitable. Obviously they see big things in Wildfire. 4mm in Series A.

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Cofounder Spain San Diego 270

philipsmith.typepad.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

While there have been times in the last dozen or so years, usually during times of venture capital excess, that cash to founders, early-stage executives and other key employees has matched regular market compensation (still with the upside of the equity), this is not true in the vast majority in the start-up game. New Business Models.

Silicon Valley 40

Silicon Valley Equity Technical Review Recapitalization 40

View from Seed

APRIL 7, 2015

Dirty Secret #1: An early-stage startup’s design actually does matter. It probably shouldn’t be the case, but the look and feel and polish of your materials makes a big difference for early-stage investors. But at the early stages, it’s surprisingly impactful.

Early Stage 120

Early Stage Founder Later Stage Engineer 120

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 12, 2013

Greg was the first person to share with me the insights of mobile conversion and why with a simpler product selection and conversion funnel they would get higher conversion on mobile than on the web. He was also the first one to challenge my conventional wisdom that it made no sense for tech companies to advertise on television.

Partner 360

Partner Las Vegas Los Angeles San Francisco 360

cdixon.org

AUGUST 3, 2012

Some observations: - Thousands of early-stage consumer web/mobile companies were started and funded in last 24 months. A few breakout early-stage consumer hits (Instagram, Pinterest) have reached tens of millions of users in record time. VCs are increasingly focusing on B2B for early-stage investments.

Bridge Financing 86

Bridge Financing Early Stage Valuation Later Stage 86

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2011

Today, the signs of the new bubble are the Linked-In initial public offering (IPO), Facebook’s stratospheric valuation and the rapid rise of early-stage startup valuation. The awareness phase is where other later-stage investors start to notice the momentum, bringing additional money in and pushing prices higher.

Silicon Valley 327

Silicon Valley Stealth Valuation Mississippi 327

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2013

And at this early stage you’ll be giving up a larger percentage of your firm to investors. A seed round can come from friends, family, Kickstarter, angels – and most importantly, early customers. These sources are a lot more forgiving of iterations and pivots than later-stage venture-capital funds.

Venture Capital 225

Venture Capital IRR Liquidity Event Business Model 225

pandodaily.com

NOVEMBER 29, 2012

This time around, there has been an explosion at the early stages, and the very late pre-IPO growth stages. But at a macro level, widespread failure this early is far less painful than if it came at later stages. In fact, if anything, there are fewer. But the Series A has remained the same. By Sarah Lacy.

Technical Review 93

Technical Review Silicon Valley Incubator Syria 93

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2010

Since then Mike his built his career by investing in early-stage companies (seed or series A), which is remarkable given that Polaris Ventures is a $1 billion fund. He says they are just as selective on seed investments as they are in later stage deals. Founded by Shervin Pishevar (COO of Webs).

San Francisco 230

San Francisco Los Angeles Cofounder SMS 230

techcrunch.com

FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Been there Done that This is very depressing for all future founders, or even currently early stage founders. cheers [link] Article Playground This venture is surely worth it Dougie Howse I think another problem with VC investments into web companies is the expectation to make 30-50+ times of return.

Venture Capital 62

Venture Capital Technical Review Sweat Equity Valuation 62

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2012

You could argue that choosing the name “first round” paints them into a corner in case they want to ever do a late stage fund, but I suspect they named it FRC precisely because they wanted to excel at early-stage investing. IA Ventures – Roger Ehrenberg was doing angel investing before he became a VC.

Community 304

Community Los Angeles Startup Silicon Valley 304

Reid Hoffman

JANUARY 19, 2021

Signing an office lease might not seem like a board-level decision, but with early-stage startups, that lease might very well be a financial liability that significantly exceeds the company’s total cash in the bank. As we discussed earlier, CEO changes rarely make sense in the early stages of a startup.

Startup 36

Startup Cofounder Advertising Hiring 36

Genuine VC

FEBRUARY 3, 2011

Once you’ve figured out whether you want to find a very early stage startup or a late stage one (the topic of my first post in this series ), the real hard work begins. On the early side, it's repeat founders coming together again or early runaway traction in an early beta that generates buzz.

Startup 148

Startup Portfolio Later Stage Hiring 148

A Crowded Space

AUGUST 4, 2011

Pretty much as any early employee will do, I did everything from sales to running product, to operations, and community and customer service, and then really spent the bulk of my time there in marketing and business development. So I moved on to an online advertising company briefly and headed up marketing and product. Marcus: All right.

Technical Review 60

Technical Review Venture Capital San Francisco Boston 60

Up and Running

JUNE 22, 2010

But today, it is far easier and far less expensive for entrepreneurs to design, code and launch web services. Yet, as they try to inject those piles of money into early-stage companies, interests become misaligned and an inherent conflict between the investor and the founder often arises. Here’s the description of a Web 2.0

Venture Capital 61

Venture Capital Merger Angel Investor Later Stage 61

The Startup Lawyer

JANUARY 6, 2011

Sure – AOL Ventures is the VC arm of AOL , focused on early stage investing in consumer internet businesses. We’re broadly interested in a bunch of different opportunities within the consumer web, and tend to focus on Seed and Series A investments in content, advertising, mobile and local spaces in the US of A. Not really.

Early Stage 58

Early Stage LP Later Stage Balance Sheet 58

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 3, 2010

the dip in capital invested but rise in deal flow is a sign of health as investors return to funding more early-stage deals,” said Jessica Canning, global research director for Dow Jones VentureSource. Through its Local Media Group, Dow Jones operates community-based newspapers and Web sites. This is a slight decrease from $7.9

China 74

China Europe North America India 74

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 26, 2011

2004 gave us widespread blogging and Meetups, and 2008 showed how the web could be a community organizing and fundraising tool. (PS.there are various companies in this article I have or have had business involvements with. Reader beware.). Open Government. Election years tend to be good for technology diffusion.

Technology 116

Technology Valuation Community Restful 116

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 12, 2009

However, this financial bar has had the effect of excluding one segment of potential customers that Id really like to see there - early stage entrepreneurs who have all the intelligence and vision of their later stage counterparts, but simply cannot afford the cash flow to attend. Expo SF (May.

Lean 60

Lean Programming San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

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. It really needs some rounded corners for that web 2.0 i think another recent guest author pointed out the same thing about just starting and building your web idea.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

www.paulgraham.com

APRIL 28, 2010

4 ] Seed Funding Firms Seed firms are like angels in that they invest relatively smallamounts at early stages, but like VCs in that theyre companiesthat do it as a business, rather than individuals making occasionalinvestments on the side. Angels and even VC firms occasionally do this, but they alsoinvest at later stages.

Technical Review 76

Technical Review Startup Software Review Angel Investor 76

Up and Running

DECEMBER 9, 2014

They cover funding for small businesses from the initial funding stage to later stages of growth, and other areas in between. After college, I was a very early employee at a web company called Tumblr. It’s a web-based time tracking system. My name is John Bates. in prosthetics. Bates: You know Josh—.

Small Business 95

Small Business Finance Forecast Metrics 95