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

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 16, 2010

You don’t need to buy expensive software – there are free open source solutions for nearly everything. You invest low amounts of capital and the company gets to IPO (96-99) or trade sale (05-08) without raising too much capital and certainly not on punishing terms. But in bad economies many angels get burned.

LP 311

LP Technical Review Early Stage Silicon Valley 311

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

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 21, 2011

Are we seeing a time in which pre-revenue companies are more valuable than our offline institutional brands? The era of cheap cloud computing plus open-source software plus digital natives unleashed upon society is creating some truly amazing products that will challenge the way we do business and the way we live our lives.

Churn Rate 309

Churn Rate IPO Open Source PR 309

Mucker Lab

APRIL 6, 2023

If you work in B2C or e-commerce, you optimize that Add to Cart flow like crazy because that is your revenue. For GitLab, we had an open source version of the product. You still have a revenue goal to hit this quarter, something like that. They just want a lot of signups, a lot of visitors, then a lot of revenue.

Product 78

Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

Cloud computing and the open source movements have brought down the costs of starting a company by more than 90%. IPO markets had burned an entire cycle of retail stock investors and many institutional investors to boot. The opportunity to transact at the point of purchase increases the sheer number of revenue opportunities.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

BeyondVC

JUNE 2, 2009

  First with the lack of an IPO market it is much harder to generate $1.5b   It can lead to a growth at all costs mentality, a lack of focus which means chasing too many opportunities at once, and a lax attitude on how to generate revenue. . 

IPO 68

IPO Valuation Open Source Sales 68

Ben's Blog

MARCH 24, 2011

To find out whether or not today’s public technology companies have hit bubble valuations, let’s compare some companies that survived the great bubble with their bubble era valuations: The Enterprise Value-to-Revenue multiple (EV/Rev) and Price-to-Earnings multiple (PE) are commonly used metrics to tell the valuation:value story. Much better.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Venture Capital Valuation Database 78

BeyondVC

APRIL 26, 2004

There have been a number of IPO fillings recently, but the one that intrigues me most is the filing by Lindows. As many of you have read, Lindows/Linspire just filed an S-1 to raise $57 million in an IPO. million of revenue in 2003 with a net loss of $4.1 It will tell us whether or not speculation will run rampant again.

IPO 60

IPO .Net Revenue Operations 60

discuss.joelonsoftware.com

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

. * I dont control the companys valuation: if for example the company is privately-held, then the value of equity might be complicated and outside my control (you can dilute equity, reinvest any revenue instead of paying it in dividends, etc., Unethical IMO but some people make money that way.

Sweat Equity 40

Sweat Equity Equity Angel Investor Affiliate 40

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. You mention "we had also built a simple cohort-based analytics system" Is tihs a commercial/open source systems. Slowly, over time, we optimized (or eliminated) each step in the process of becoming a customer by giving us money.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 15, 2017

Orcam was created by the founders of Mobileye (NYSE: MBLY and one of Israel’s largest IPOs ), Prof. is an AI-powered log analysis platform that offers the open source ELK Stack as an enterprise-grade cloud service with machine learning technology. Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram (great interview with them here ).

Artificial Inteligence 122

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Startup 122

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

In fact, in the early days, when IMVU would experience unexpected surges of revenue or traffic, it was inevitable that every person in the company was convinced that their project was responsible. When something works, its too easy to invent a story about how that was your intention all along. Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

www.paulgraham.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

But this is just the kindthat tends to be open source: operating systems, programminglanguages, editors, and so on. In those days you could go public as adogfood portal, so as a company with a real product and real revenues,we might have done well. A rich companyis one with large revenues. This money isnt revenue.

Startup 105

Startup Cofounder Software Stock 105

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Revenue is always my preferred measure, but you can use anything that is important to your business: retention, activation, viral invites, or even customer satisfaction in the form of something like net promoter score. Or it could be that they are endlessly pecking through menus, totally confused about what to do next.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Ben's Blog

AUGUST 31, 2020

IN THIS EDITION Fintech products ease more Americans into the stock market In defense of the IPO, and how to improve it What’s inside your (mobile) bank? The proof is seemingly obvious: IPOs are 50x oversubscribed! An IPO is far from perfect, but this narrative is almost completely false. Thanks for signing up.

IPO 36

IPO Stock Software Review API 36

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 9, 2010

By then the open-source movement had really developed. We were able to use an open source database (Postgres), open source search (Lucene) and a host of other free components including Apache Tomcat, JBoss. When I started my second company in 2005 we decided to do everything differently.

Cloud 343

Cloud Technical Review Database Semantic 343

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2011

Juno IPO’d while Joel was there, and it was the first “broken&# IPO of the dot-com era. As an example, Joel says that there is a chief revenue officer who is solely responsible for bringing in revenue to StackExchange. He is responsible for bringing in revenue from advertising and their careers offering.

Software Review 285

Software Review Software St. Louis API 285

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

For life sciences it was the Genentech IPO in 1980 that proved to investors that life science startups could make them a ton of money. Today open source software has slashed the cost of software development from millions of dollars to thousands. My students think of computing power as a utility like I think of electricity.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

gigaom.com

NOVEMBER 5, 2012

Heck, even Microsoft appears to be making a big bet on machine learning as the foundation of a new revenue stream. ROOT is entirely Open Source (LGPL). Flurry rides the mobile boom, raises $25M with an eye toward IPO. See: [link]. Darren Oddie. Monday, November 5 2012. Search for: Related.

Artificial Inteligence 91

Artificial Inteligence SQL Database Framework 91

Scalable Startup

MAY 16, 2015

is mostly sanguine, claiming that the market’s standards for viability have increased since the 2000 bust and citing Twitter (revenue but no profit) as the model for the new public tech company.

San Francisco 20

San Francisco Silicon Valley California Oakland 20