Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2019

As Venture Capital emerged as an industry in the mid 1970’s, investors in venture-funded startups began to give stock options to all their employees. Startup Compensation Changes with Growth Capital – 12 Years to an IPO. And Mark Suster of Upfront Capital has a great post that summarizes these changes.

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Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

While this signaled that investments in technology companies could be very lucrative, both Shockley and Fairchild could only be funded through corporate partners – there was no venture capital industry. government backed venture firms and limited partnerships. A wave of innovation was about to meet a pile of risk capital.

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2012

The Facebook IPO has reinforced the new calculus for investors. And as Clean Tech VC’s have painfully learned, trying to scale Clean Tech past demonstration plants to industrial scale takes capital and time past the resources of venture capital. Filed under: Technology , Venture Capital. and put U.S.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Consumer Internet investing seems to have split off from traditional Venture Capital, and is creating a new category of VC’s: Lean VC’s. Electron-based Venture Capital. When I first came to Silicon Valley the world of Venture Capital looked pretty simple. Here’s why.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

Venture Capital Issues. Early stage Venture Capital for medical device startups has dried up. The amount of capital being invested in new device companies is at an 11 year low. Because device IPOs are rare, and M&A is much tougher, liquidity for investors is hard to find. Venture Capital.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

The previous post described the evolution of the Chinese Venture Capital system. China Venture Capital. If it’s driven by profit then the ecosystem needs both entrepreneurs as well as Venture Finance. China has the biggest Venture Capital industry outside the U.S. Entrepreneurship in Beijing.

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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 Linked-in IPO valued the company at $8.9 It sent a signal that there is an irrational demand for tech IPOs. Filed under: Venture Capital.

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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. With Netscape’s IPO , there was suddenly a public market for companies with limited revenue and no profit. Filed under: Technology , Venture Capital.

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Steve Blank

JULY 19, 2011

When we were trying to raise money for E.piphany, my last startup, I was negotiating with a venture capital firm called Infinity Capital. After our IPO Infinity’s and Kleiner Perkins’ investment in Epiphany would be worth $1 billion dollars to each of them.). Filed under: E.piphany , Venture Capital.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

Alex explained that in his community building a successful venture that generated nice cash flows – not IPO’s – were the big win. It was clear Alex was a bit apologetic; photo studios, online retail subscriptions to commodity household and personal hygiene products, etc.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

The previous post described the evolution of the Chinese Venture Capital system. China Venture Capital. If it’s driven by profit then the ecosystem needs both entrepreneurs as well as Venture Finance. China has the biggest Venture Capital industry outside the U.S. Entrepreneurship in Beijing.

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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).

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

Venture-backed startups will often have a Series C or D or later rounds during this phase. In the Grow phase the company has achieved liquidity (an IPO, or has been bought or merged into a larger company event) and is growing by repeatable processes. Filed under: Family/Career/Culture , Lean LaunchPad , Venture Capital.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 17, 2011

But they don’t support his justification of the bubble valuations we are seeing for companies filing for IPO’s (Pandora Media just priced its IPO at $2.6 Filed under: Venture Capital. billion dollars while admitting it will have operating losses through the end of fiscal 2012.)

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

My first IPO at Convergent. We must have made them play the demo twenty times. There were a few times in my career I knew at that moment I was watching something profound – (Holding the glass masks of the Z80 microprocessor. First silicon of the MIPS RISC processor.)

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

When I looked at the diagram in that ski cabin I realized there was a fundamental question I couldn’t answer: if all startups follow that model, why is it that some companies are opening bottles of champagne at their IPO and others who almost followed the same rules are selling off their furniture? What was the difference here?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

It was still a year away from its IPO. And venture capital and entrepreneurship has made life even tougher for the modern corporation. Over the last 35 years venture capital has funded nimble new entrants (on a scale never imagined by Schumpeter ) who exist to exploit discontinuities in technology or customer behavior.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

M&A, IPO? Product Development – How do you engineer it? Waterfall, Agile, Lean? Manufacturing – How do you build it? Seed and Follow-on Financing – How do your finance it? Liquidity – How? These are just my checklist list items for students, your list doesn’t have to look like this.)

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Assuming no early liquidity (via an IPO or merger) for the company, more fund raising is required. In the dot-com bubble economy, the investors used an IPO at product launch to take the money and run, before there was a track record of success or failure.) Building the sales channel and supporting the marketing can burn a lot of cash.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2011

There are no tours of companies or venture capital firms. You too can name a building after your IPO (and $30 million.) Startups and innovation have exploded here because of the rise of venture capital. Filed under: Family/Career , Technology , Venture Capital. Go to a Techcrunch event. Never leave.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2022

In 2021 venture capital funds invested over $2 billion in 90+ Quantum technology companies. While most of the IPOs have been in Quantum Computing, Quantum technologies are used in three very different and distinct markets: Quantum Computing , Quantum Communications and Quantum Sensing and Metrology.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2011

In 5 to 10 years most of them will be worth a fraction of their IPO price. Filed under: Family/Career , Secret History of Silicon Valley , Venture Capital. Are we in the beginnings of a tech bubble – yes. Prices for both private and public tech valuations exceed any rational valuation to their current worth.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Yet one of the most remarkable things about the boom in microwave and silicon startups occurring in the 1950’s and 60’s was that it was done without venture capital. ARD was a publicly traded venture capital firm (raising $3.5 There was none. military and intelligence agencies and defense contractors. Whitney Co.

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Steve Blank

JULY 6, 2010

He started a new venture firm when he realized that that the rules had changed for the venture business – VC’s could no longer expect the same kind of returns they got in the past through an IPO. Filed under: Customer Development , Durant versus Sloan: Startups Verus Companies , Venture Capital.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

These IPOs meant that technology companies didn’t have to get acquired to raise money or get their founders and investors liquid. But by the 1960′s the tidal wave of semiconductor startups would find a valley with a growing number of SBIC backed venture firms and limited partnerships. More on this in the next post.

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Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

the wave of semiconductor startups in the 1960’s/70’s, the emergence of Venture Capital as a professional industry, the personal computer revolution in 1980’s, the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s and finally. Venture Capital used to be a tight club clustered around formal firms located in Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 19, 2013

But what if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? At the same time, Venture Capital, which had viewed therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices as hot places to invest, is fleeing the field. Venture Capital Issues.

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