Steve Blank

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Why a Company Can’t “Be More Like a Startup”

Steve Blank

Uber – current valuation >$70 billion – knew the day they started that their ridesharing service violated the law in most jurisdictions. Airbnb – current valuation $31 billion – allows people to rent out their homes, rooms or apartments to visitors. Here are some of the most visible examples.

Startup 275
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Corporate Acquisitions of Startups: Why Do They Fail?

Steve Blank

VCs like acquisitions as much as IPOs because the acquiring companies often can rationalize paying large multiples over the current valuation of the startup. However, these nosebleed valuations make it even more important in getting the acquired company integrated correctly.

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Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out – The Startup Genome Project

Steve Blank

Max and his partners interviewed and analyzed over 650 early-stage Internet startups. Today they released the first Startup Genome Report — a 67 page in-depth analysis on what makes early-stage Internet startups successful. longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x

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Organizational Debt is like Technical debt – but worse

Steve Blank

Organizational debt is all the people/culture compromises made to “just get it done” in the early stages of a startup. While he kept bringing the conversation back to their big valuation I tried to steer the conversation back to how they were going to deal with: training the influx of new hires – in both culture and job specific tasks.

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The Virus Survival Strategy For Your Startup

Steve Blank

If you’re an early stage company, that number may be zero. They triage their deals – first worrying about liquidity of their late stage deals which have the highest valuations. In every major downturn inflated valuations disappear and the few VC’s still writing new checks find it’s a buyer’s market.

Burn Rate 436
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The Next Bubble – Don’t Get Fooled Again

Steve Blank

A tech bubble is the rapid inflation in the valuation of public and private technology companies that exceeds their fundamental value by a large margin. 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.

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Consultants Don’t Pivot, Founders Do

Steve Blank

Sean Ellis , a consultant who works with early stage companies, believes that “the cost of a consultant’s time can never be justified working with startups pre product/market fit – the failure rate is just too high.”. Sean believes that, “Consultants can improve the growth trajectory after your first business model is found. (In

Founder 199