ReadWriteStart

JULY 18, 2011

Jeff Clavier was the first tech investor I ever met; he was introduced to me years ago by some hip engineers in a bar as "one of the few cool VCs." Kedrosky: "In the 90's I was an analyst through all this [tech investment and IPO] madness. You want to build your own IPO and exit. Think about when LinkedIn went public.

Investment Bankers 153

Investment Bankers Technical Review Cofounder Due Diligence 153

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Dot.com Bubble ( 1995-2000): “ Anything goes” as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability. VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Rob Go

DECEMBER 28, 2011

IPO’s/Exits. Kayak: Registered for an IPO but on hold. 61M in Q3 revenue, up 28% YoY. Raised $174M in its IPO in April, current market cap ~$550M. in its IPO, current market cap of $282M. The company is expected to do around $500M in revenue in 2011 and has seen 50%+ growth YoY the past two years.

Technical Review 54

Technical Review Boston Software Review IPO 54

David Teten

MARCH 14, 2018

We particularly help companies in winning revenue from our LP network and raising capital for subsequent rounds from top-tier late-stage investors. engineers, designers, business developers). Prominent investor Chamath Palihapitiya recently announced he is launching a blank-check public VC fund, hoping to raise $500 million in an IPO.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Cofounder 60

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 23, 2012

.” Here’s the summary of his track record (excerpted from the Fast Company article): Forefront — IPO’ed in 1995 by CBT — CBT stock fell 85% in 1998 and prompted class-action lawsuits. invested, IPO’ed in 2000 for $32/share — stock price now $2. from an IPO under a year ago of $10.

IPO 240

IPO Flash Bootstrapping Private Equity 240

Agile VC

OCTOBER 1, 2013

Facebook’s IPO was obviously a debacle, and in the private investment sphere valuations from the seed through late stage have declined for the most part from their peaks in late 2011 through early 2012. IPO Market Is Strong - All the companies I just mentioned in cloud computing have gone public within the last 12 months.

IPO 147

IPO Cloud Valuation Mobile 147

Version One Ventures

DECEMBER 14, 2016

forward revenue in February 2016 (the low), they appreciated by 6% each month for the following six months. Of course, upcoming IPOs like Snapchat will bring some added excitement to the industry. There was a significant pull-back of the public markets in Q1. Yet while they were trading at 3.3x for the last two years.

Technical Review 60

Technical Review Early Stage Portfolio Valuation 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

Over a 25 year career, Baughman has gained experience in leading worldwide sales organizations, brings expertise in full life cycle product management, proven revenue creation and growth management including taking a start up from zero to $1.6B, and shepherding companies through all phases from start up launch to IPO to acquisition.

Naming 59

Naming Hiring Technical Review Virginia 59

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. Since that time we've seen a massive change from product engineering to financial engineering. Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

crowdSPRING Blog

JANUARY 18, 2013

A VC: MBA Mondays: Revenue Models – Subscriptions – [link]. Thanks To Facebook, Strongest Year For IPOs Since 2000 With $21.5 Facebook Has Some Tips | Search Engine Land - [link]. The Science of Productivity: How To Get More Done In Less Time – [link]. Why Startups Die | The Next Web - [link].

Social Media 94

Social Media Small Business Design Media 94

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Feld Thoughts

AUGUST 25, 2015

Not really; it was a result of an industry investing into a frothy market at higher and higher valuations in expectation of near term liquidity, and suddenly the IPO window shutting, leading to no exits and little additional capital to support these companies. By 1994 the big software wins of the 1980’s were already funded or public.”

Venture Capital 70

Venture Capital SBIC Technical Review Silicon Valley 70

View from Seed

JULY 24, 2015

The invite-only event was attended by 300 of the area’s best tech leaders, founders, product managers, designers, developers, investors, engineers, salesmen and women, and more, all of whom are hard at work in consumer tech. On Tuesday, July 21, we hosted the first-ever Boston Consumer Tech Summit. At NextView, we invest across the US.

Boston 120

Boston Cofounder B2C PR 120

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 26, 2020

As a hardware engineer, you already know the value, importance, and layout of a spec to keep you focused, but you may not be so familiar with the key elements of a business plan, and the way to use it to support and add credibility to your hardware solution. They want to see revenue to share in the return.

Business Plan 423

Business Plan Product Intellectual Property Elevator Pitch 423

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 6, 2017

Also, most VCs are only looking for companies in a high-growth track where any net revenue will be reinvested for growth (no corporate profits, no corporate tax), so they are selecting for companies for whom an LLC structure isn’t really that appealing. But not all VCs think that way. In that world, everyone is a Delaware C-Corp.

Delaware 48

Delaware LLC Startup Silicon Valley 48

Agile VC

MAY 22, 2014

Unfortunately Alibaba doesn’t actually break out revenue by marketplace or business unit. In fact JD.com, which priced it’s IPO yesterday, is a direct seller (e.g. The makeup of the revenue is different too (see #4 below). And most importantly how attractive is the whole based on the sum of the underlying parts?

China 159

China Revenue Flash Affiliate 159

www.huffingtonpost.com

MAY 10, 2011

Because we achieved our most aggressive revenue targets and built a strong community, we realized that we had a broader opportunity to change the world of graphic design. However, we needed a head of engineering to recruit and lead a larger team to accomplish our larger goals. This time, I decided to handle the process myself.

CTO 43

CTO CTO Hire PHP Cofounder 43

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

— Unremarked and unheralded, the balance of power between startup CEOs and their investors has radically changed: IPOs/M&A without a profit (or at times revenue) have become the norm. In the 20th century tech companies and their investors made money through an Initial Public Offering (IPO).

Founder 245

Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 245

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

One would think that designing a medical device would be a simple engineering problem, and startups would be emerging right and left. on medical device revenues, regardless of profitability delays or cash-flow breakeven. Because device IPOs are rare, and M&A is much tougher, liquidity for investors is hard to find.

Startup 294

Startup Venture Capital Lean IPO 294

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

K9 Ventures

APRIL 9, 2014

Threshold for an IPO is higher Ten years ago, if you had $20M in revenue you were ready to go public. If you have <$100M in revenue, you’re probably going to stay private. Top engineering talent today has a bimodal distribution. Today, you need almost 5x or 10x that number to even be eligible.

Mezzanine 134

Mezzanine Seed Stage Early Stage IPO 134

YoungUpstarts

JULY 29, 2013

by Meng Weng Wong, co-founder and social engineer at JFDI Asia. But they’ll sit up and pay attention when you talk about the customers and revenues of the business. Hero mentors” have exited their businesses through a trade sale or IPO, sometimes multiple times; they offer inspiration to your team and coaching on strategy and tactics.

Asia 207

Asia Singapore Cofounder Incubator 207

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2012

I teach entrepreneurship for ~50 student teams a year from engineering schools at Stanford , Berkeley, and Columbia. The Facebook IPO has reinforced the new calculus for investors. Kennedy, September 1962. Innovation. In the past, if you were a great VC, you could make $100 million on an investment in 5-7 years.

Silicon Valley 336

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Social Media Media 336

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 14, 2021

5000 list , which lists private American companies based on three-year revenue growth between 2016 and 2019. Our platform was really over-engineered for simple retail 1040 work, and it had the potential at the time to route hundreds of thousands of jobs to tens of thousands of CPAs on a mass basis. Last year, Taxfyle ranked No.

CPA 138

CPA Founder Vertical Cofounder 138

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

One is used by engineers to refer to the process of getting code fully integrated into production. In such a system, the primary goal of each engineer is to stay busy, using as close to 100% of his or her time for coding as possible. As luck would have it, one of IMVU’s engineers happened to be in the audience at the time.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If all the engineers work on the same thing at the same time, and all the marketers do the same, and QA, and ops, all the way down the line, then each department develops its own team-based private reality. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

www.mint.com

MARCH 9, 2010

If the answer to the question centers around “We will achieve revenue soon so our net will improve and give us more runway,” it means the company is in trouble because no product ever ships on time nor achieves the company’s “conservative forecast.” These days revenue is the best source of capital. Who is on your board of directors?

Software Review 68

Software Review Startup Post-Money Valuation Technical Review 68

Mucker Lab

APRIL 6, 2023

It's very hard for PLG to be the only or main motion with infrastructure products because it's not something one engineer will just test and buy. A lot of times as founders–especially technical founders, engineers, product people–believe if we build this awesome feature that solves your pain point, you should come and use it.

Product 78

Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis. I am chugging along.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Austin Startup

JANUARY 27, 2019

As I wrote about in this Lucky7 post , Bazaarvoice was one of the most capital efficient companies leading up to the IPO as compared to many companies that reach this milestone. This is true in all cultures, whether you are primarily engineering-driven or sales-driven. he’s our incredible Chief Revenue Officer.

Conversion 48

Conversion Email Cofounder Hosting 48

Duct Tape Marketing

SEPTEMBER 29, 2022

Questions I ask Mike Evans: [1:46] Could you give us a high-level overview of the startup of Grubhub to IPO to what you’re doing now? 12:51] Right up to IPO at which point you quit, which I think some people would actually say, you made it now, why are you quitting? He lives in Chicago with his wife, daughter, dog, and bike.

Founder 82

Founder Chicago Kansas Startup 82

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets. They are on-schedule and on-budget, but their gross metrics are way off.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 10, 2018

Social media and the need to rank higher on search engines continues to grow in importance with U.S. Sagoon was originally formed as a search engine in 2009, but we continued to evolve as a company when we saw an opportunity to provide a social media experience that also focused on the growing interest in social commerce offerings.

DC 48

DC Social Media India Asia 48

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 25, 2018

My first day at Bazaarvoice was just a few weeks later, on May 2, 2005, and we built a company from inception to IPO on around $12m of capital use (out of the $24m we raised) in 7 years, creating over a thousand jobs and impacting clients all over the world?—?starting I built the eCommerce engine myself and self-funded the business.

Bootstrapping 48

Bootstrapping Austin Equity Cofounder 48

Agile VC

MAY 23, 2012

In the wake of the undue frenzy leading up to and now ex post recriminations about Facebook’s IPO, the mainstream media and normal folks keep wondering if the non-existent “bubble” for internet companies has now popped. The End of “Internet” Companies. May 23, 2012. Silly stuff like this.

Internet 182

Internet Silicon Valley IPO Seed Stage 182