Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 25, 2015

I take my hat off to people like Adam Miller , the CEO of LA-based Cornerstone on Demand, who started at the exact same time as I did (November 1999) and is still the CEO but now of a public company valued at around $2 billion. We grew 100% in SaaS revenue year-over-year and 650% over the past three years.

Silicon Valley 150

Silicon Valley IPO Demand Revenue 150

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 13, 2013

Like most startup entrepreneurs, when I began my first company in 1999 I had no formal sales experience. And when you achieve product / market fit your company often ramps revenue very fast and you need to build an organization to address it from demand generation (aka marketing) to sales discovery to implementation and after-sales support.

Sales 393

Sales Startup Framework Search 393

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 4, 2010

This is important because the customers they serve (the red line) demand a product that meets their complex requirements. In 1999-2000 they weren’t doing enterprise-wide installations at Merrill Lynch, Dell and Cisco. You can’t take a $5 billion revenue stream and say “Fuck it. Enter Salesforce.com.

Vesting 376

Vesting Framework Revenue Technology 376

thebarefootvc

DECEMBER 16, 2011

In places where international diplomacy had failed, citizens around the world found their individual and collective voices to topple dictatorships and demand better lives for themselves and future generations. What comes next remains to be seen but these revolutions even empowered individuals not touched directly by the uprisings.

Technical Review 110

Technical Review India Mobile Hockey Stick 110

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 16, 2009

On some level we felt we did because being a SaaS company in 1999 was trailblazing. We found that at the low end there wasn’t enough revenue to make it worth our while. Deer are not so big that they can make huge demands on you for your development resources or customer support. See definition of a whore. Who else?).

Startup 389

Startup Early Stage Demand Channel 389

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

With that implicit assumption, startups hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies while marketing creates a brand and buzz to create demand and drive it into the sales channel (web, direct salesforce, etc.) After twelve months Handspring’s revenue was $170 million. End result?

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

VC Cafe

OCTOBER 24, 2011

Service includes integrated Google Analytics, SEO tools, and on-demand customer service. billion back in 1999 ; Yahoo has since shutdown Geocities after failing to charge all its users to use the service. million, has revenues of over $2 million a year. mo or $5.95/mo mo if booked one year in advance.

Coder 87

Coder Angel Investor Web Bootstrapping 87

YoungUpstarts

MAY 21, 2012

All businesses begin with a specific idea in mind, and although some stick to exactly what they started with, it’s much more common to find that a business has grown and evolved over time to keep up with changes in supply, demand, and even resource availability. In 1999, Goodrich became the No. billion in September 2011.

Mississippi 209

Mississippi San Francisco Minnesota Bankruptcy 209

BeyondVC

JUNE 8, 2004

I have always been a big believer of the hosted software or ASP (application service provider) model since we made our first investment in LivePerson in January 1999. One of our main competitors of that era was Kana, which at that time, did way better than LivePerson in terms of customers, revenue, and market capitalization.

Demand 60

Demand Bandwidth Hosting IPO 60

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 3, 2012

With over $1 billion in revenue, 2000 employees and a market capitalization of over $6 billion, Akamai has become a role model for scalable start-ups. billion in revenue, over $1 billion in gross profit and $500 million in EBITDA. The first year of revenue (1999) was $4 million – a remarkable achievement.

Distribution 49

Distribution Lean Massachusetts Cofounder 49

Ben's Blog

OCTOBER 29, 2020

The laws of supply and demand, and marginal pricing, withstand the test of time. Demand matters: IPOs are a bull market product Gauging demand for an IPO can be difficult, in part because so many IPO order books are over-subscribed. The tl;dr: It’s Economics 101.

IPO 36

IPO Securities and Exchange Commission Demand SEC 36

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 14, 2017

For those that do, the benefits are a bigger customer base, higher revenues and higher profitability. To tackle this, B-Free researched and patented another product based on market demand. 1 Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy, March 24, 1999.

Global 145

Global Small Business Asia Singapore 145

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 17, 2010

App is one step forward, two steps back – In 1999 I launched my first company, BuildOnline, a SaaS-based (back then we were ASP’s) content management platform for large-scale engineering and construction projects. Apple wants to take a major share of the revenue. But I’m with Jason Calacanis. And that Palm Pre.

Flash 326

Flash Mobile Application Development Cloud 326

Hearpreneur

OCTOBER 30, 2015

In January of 1999, I co-founded a marketing agency with a former boss. I saw the struggles of my father as a mover, and started QuikForce, an online, on-demand professional moving platform targeted at helping movers, like my father, better schedule, manage and plan their moves. Thanks to Mike Samson, crowdSPRING. #3 software.

Entrepreneur 48

Entrepreneur Australia Software Review LLC 48

abovethecrowd.com

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

In 1999, Jack Ma created Alibaba , a Chinese-based B2B marketplace for connecting small and medium enterprise with potential export opportunities. In November of this year, the company announced that it had achieved “substantially” more than $1B in revenue in the third quarter. billion of GSV (gross services revenue) across 2.0

Internet 88

Internet Matching Vertical Hosting 88

Up and Running

SEPTEMBER 15, 2015

million in 1999, Zappos is now worth $1 billion. Ferris eventually sold BrainQuicken and became a best-selling author, in-demand blogger, business consultant, motivator, and popular endorser. From a company worth $1.6 See Also: What Defines Your Company Culture? Focus on flexibility of strategy.

Small Business 60

Small Business Non-Compete Europe Philippines 60

Growthink Blog

JUNE 19, 2010

What is the future of Pay-Per-View/Video-on-Demand (PPV and VOD)? Video-on-demand alone is estimated to grow from a $1.1 revenues from internet video services spanning user-generated content to television shows and movies will exceed $7 billion this year. How about Internet Video? Annual U.S. Annual U.S.

Los Angeles 76

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Technical Review IP 76

abovethecrowd.com

APRIL 20, 2016

A high performing, high-growth SAAS company that may have been worth 10 or more times revenue was suddenly worth 4-7 times revenue. In 1999, record valuations coexisted with record IPOs and shareholder liquidity. If 1999 was a wet (read liquid) bubble, 2015 was a particularly dry one. 2015 was the exact opposite.

IPO 40

IPO Term Sheet Silicon Valley Valuation 40

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2010

My first company was a SaaS software company started in 1999. Because over time users will demand open. Many of us argued at the time that the browsers would get more powerful and we bet our companies on that by not developing client applications. But what about the “fixed&# world (e.g. non-mobile).

Web 300

Web HTML AJAX China 300

VC Cafe

JANUARY 10, 2011

Zend has shown significant traction, having reached record revenue growth in 2010, while servicing large enterprise clients such as NYSE Euronext, GE and Cisco. Zend was started in 1999 and is currently headquartered in Cupertino, CA with an R&D office in Israel. According to Linkedin , Zend has a headcount of 130.

Private Equity 87

Private Equity Equity PHP 87

Ben's Blog

MAY 24, 2021

Small” IPOs — companies with less than $50m in annual revenue at the time of IPO – have declined from more than 50% of all IPOs in the 1980-2000 timeframe to about 25% of IPOs from 2001-2016; Companies are staying private much longer — the median time to IPO from founding hovered around 6.5 1999-2000 51.6% 1990-1998 13.3%

SEC 36

SEC Accredited Investor IPO Technical Review 36

Start Up Blog

JUNE 6, 2019

After the Dot Com crash of 1999, most yet-to-be-disrupted big firms got back to business. New industries never ask if it’s ok to sell a new raw material, they just take it and commercialise the demand for it. Because shareholders liked that it was only 2 weeks revenue or 6% of cash on hand. But when the web 2.0

Government 79

Government Algorithm Artificial Inteligence Social Media 79

VC Cafe

DECEMBER 28, 2010

Virtualization technology is increasingly in demand as large corporations try to cut back on hardware in their data centers. GE, which entered the water industry in 1999 and is involved in a wide variety of water technologies, in the last five years doubled its investment in water technology related R&D to reach $1.5

Technical Review 87

Technical Review South Korea Mexico 87

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 9, 2010

When I started my first company in 1999 we spent more than $2 million on technology infrastructure including Sun servers & Solaris operating system, Oracle databases, EMC storage, load balancers, app servers, back-up devices, disk mirrors and on and on. .&# An early star in this category has been RightScale.

Cloud 343

Cloud Technical Review Database Semantic 343

abovethecrowd.com

JUNE 2, 2021

On the demand side, the IPO process is limited to a handful of institutional investors and also ignores the vast majority of retail investors. Investment banks simply do not match supply and demand. When I share this, reporters often ask me, “why is management so gullible to sit there and listen to a demand imbalance goal of 30x-50x?”.

IPO 82

IPO Customer Matching Silicon Valley 82

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. A Wired article entitled “Will 2014 Be the Year the Tech Bubble Bursts?” First Street and Market Street by Leo vanMunching. And the losers?

San Francisco 20

San Francisco Silicon Valley California Oakland 20

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

I see companies that have been trying to raise professional money for years and have struggled suddenly gearing up for ICOs because they know there is so much demand from them — precisely because so many people speculatively made money on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Government 280

Government Distribution Stock United States 280