VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 15, 2017

Don’t take my word for it – in the roundup of venture capital predictions for 2017 , I found it to be the top recurring theme. Many large companies will be built (Michael Wolfe, Point Nine Capital). In 2016 alone, 300+ “machine intelligence” (AI + ML) startups in Europe raised over €1.4

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Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Startup 122

VC Cafe

JANUARY 29, 2024

It’s easy to find bad news about venture capital these days. In other words, the venture capital bust has only just started. 2023 was a rough year for Venture Capital and for startups, and it might get even worse. Global venture funding fell 42% year over years to $248.8

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Generative AI Global Venture Capital Valuation 171

VC Cafe

JUNE 30, 2022

The Israeli startups building the Metaverse (Source: Remagine Ventures, via Calcalist ). To get a sense of the breadth of opportunities that can be attractive for gaming (content and infrastructure) entrepreneurs and metaverse startups, just take a look at the A16Z list below. There is also a growing ecosystem of startups.

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Cloud Venture Capital Cofounder Non-Compete 200

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2015

I first met Evangelos Simoudis when he ran IBM’s Business Intelligence Solutions Division and then as CEO of his first startup Customer Analytics. Evangelos has spent the last 15 years as a Venture Capitalist, first at Apax Partners and later at Trident Capital. Venture capital firms, as we know them only date back to the 1970s.)

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Silicon Valley Venture Capital United States Technical Review 120

David Teten

JANUARY 21, 2021

V: Should you raise venture capital from a traditional equity VC or a Revenue-Based Investing VC? Capacity Capital , based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was launched in 2020 with a primary focus on the Southeast. GCVF is pioneering the future of venture capital and high growth startups for all small communities.

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Equity Revenue Cofounder Colorado 78

VC Cafe

JULY 7, 2023

I was interviewed by TheMarker (Hebrew only) on why Israeli startups haven’t been part of the mega funding rounds in AI. I thought it’s a good timing to elaborate on where I see opportunities for Israeli startups in this rapidly growing space. billion, a 73% YoY drop, according to a new report by Viola.

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Generative AI ChatGPT Startup 88

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2022

Today, 100s of billions of dollars in private capital have been invested in 1,000s of AI startups. Power Recommendation Engines. Engineers can input design goals into AI-driven generative design software , along with parameters such as performance or spatial requirements, materials, manufacturing methods, and cost constraints.

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Artificial Inteligence Software Review Algorithm Technical Review 417

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. And he recognized it was making his startup feel and act like a big ponderous company. Most decisions in a startup must be made in the face of uncertainty. The same is true in your company.

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Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

When you first start your company and raise initial venture capital your board probably consists of 1-3 founders and 1-2 VCs. Over time you start to figure out who you customers are and how to sell to them or how to get them to adopt your products if you’re a consumer-oriented startup. In the Early Days.

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Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

By the late 1930′s when HP started, a small group (measured in hundreds) of engineers who made radio tubes were building the valleys’ ecosystem for electronics manufacturing, product engineering and technology management. Who would have known?

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Austin Startup

JUNE 27, 2017

Looking for Funds in All the Right Places: The Definitive Guide to Austin Capital By David Altounian and Stephen Straus OVERVIEW For entrepreneurs: We’ve compiled a definitive list of sources of capital in Austin to help focus your fundraising efforts. We’ve compiled a definitive list of sources of startup capital in Austin.

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VC Cafe

MAY 23, 2023

On the other hand, check out ProductHunt or a few AI newsletter and you’ll quickly hear about more than 1,000 generative AI startups, with new ones popping up daily. Is it startups or incumbents? As I mentioned in my post on the LLM Benchmarking , venture capital investment in AI startups was down 43% in Q1 2023.

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Generative AI Artificial Inteligence ChatGPT API 165

Austin Startup

MARCH 7, 2018

Mellie Price (@mellieprice) | Twitter Heather Brunner CEO WPEngine Heather Brunner is one of the most successful tech CEO’s in Austin’s history, recently raising $250 million in funding from Silver Lake for WP Engine, the leading digital experience platform built on Wordpress.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 48

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. (My It was a long way from Ellis Island.)

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Private equity and venture capital investors are copying our sisters in the hedge fund world: we’re trying to automate more of our job. . See Bessemer Venture Partners’ A comprehensive guide to security for startups. Tribe Capital has developed A Quantitative Approach to Product Market Fit. . 2) Market .

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Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. In either type of startup you want to put in place processes in place to reduce risk.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 128

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising.

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

To an entrepreneur, being asked to join a venture firm with an Entrepreneur-in-Residence title means you have been tapped on the shoulder by the VC gods. I had no idea what I wanted to do next, and would get paid to think about it? How could it go wrong? Little did I know. Now he wanted to go off start his own company.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Useful blogs and links for startups Click Here ————– 2.

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Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. would look in each of the verticals. For example, How does sales differ from one market to another?

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. On the other hand, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor (used in the Sun and Apollo engineering workstations) and the IBM 360/370 mainframes were big-endian.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) Their engineers hated us. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

And while others in our new startup came from companies like Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) that had sold computers to automate scientific instrumentation and process control, the computers we were building at Ardent were targeted to different customers and markets. The problem was I didn’t have a clue.

Silicon Valley 147

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Marketing is Heard From Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 271

www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

25 Best Startup Failure Post-Mortems of All Time. Update – As a followup, we analyzed all of these startup failure post-mortems to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure. Also worth a read after you review these startup failure post-mortems. Post-Mortem Title : How My Startup Failed.

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Software Review Startup Technical Review Vesting 79

VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

They are accustomed to more frictionless buying, easier payments, smarter recommendation engines, sharper display (product images, 3D, HD), short fulfillment time, and excellent customer service. Practically impossible for a startup. That marketing, however, is dependent on capital, and that capital means Venture Capital.

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eCommerce Open Source SEM Technical Review 94

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

VC Cafe

JUNE 19, 2020

“Because COVID is shaking our habits and beliefs it opens the door to discussion to whether we should change our whole system,” says veteran investor Sir Ronald Cohen, chairman of the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment and the man known as “the father of British venture capital” . A Global Impact Tech Alliance.

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Venture Capital Global South Africa 174

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 16, 2012

This is a company that took $4 million of invested capital to build a company now worth over $4 billion. As we have seen with the recent speed bumps at highfliers like Groupon and Zynga, taking “lean startups” from foundation to creating sustainable, scalable, profitable business models is a very rare and special task. Really hard.

Part-Time VPE 54

Part-Time VPE Software Review Costa Rica Technical Review 54

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Luckily while I was teaching classes at headquarters, Zilog’s field application engineers (the technical engineers working alongside our salesmen) would work side-by-side with our large customers as they designed their systems with our chips. Keep in mind this is still several years before the IBM PC and DOS.

Silicon Valley 175

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 175

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. He’s Only in Field Service When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “ Serial Communications Controller &# ( SCC ).

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. I didn’t need to look much further than the “new building&# debacle I had a hand in. That’s when things went south.

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Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. No one had sat the marketing department down and defined what our department Mission (with a capital “M”) was. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 6, 2011

This curriculum is based on the various questions entrepreneurs have asked me over these 64 sessions, spanning financing, positioning, customer acquisition, marketing, sales, channel, and various other early stage, startup-related issues. As usual, then, I worked with three entrepreneurs working on specific businesses. Mava Consulting.

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Vertical Web San Francisco Entrepreneur 115

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 14, 2021

The Startup Magazine continues our Founder Interview series with entrepreneur Richard Lavina, Co-Founder and CEO of accounting services platform, Taxfyle. Here are Richard’s insights and startup advice he shared with us about his entrepreneurial journey…. TSM: Taxfyle is really no longer a startup, it is a “scaleup”.

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CPA Founder Vertical Cofounder 136