Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 9, 2010

Investors often say that successfully navigating the early stages of a startup requires lots of street smarts, guts, and luck. Way back in 2002, John Hamm published some early work on this subject in " Why Entrepreneurs Don't Scale. Trusting your gut at this stage isn’t good enough. Absolute control.

Founder 228

Founder Early Stage Startup Entrepreneur 228

View from Seed

JANUARY 26, 2016

With that in mind, let’s look at an illustration of these trends below, which demonstrates what’s been happening to early-stage financing rounds over the last 15 years or so. Series A investors invested quite early, often before product/market fit.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage Early Stage Cofounder Finance 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 8, 2016

Ryan Smith co-founded Qualtrics in 2002 with his father in the family basement. Lane also founded Wheelhouse, a Canadian organization that supports other entrepreneurs through mentorship, access to early stage capital, and connections to global business networks and executive expertise. . Clips from their interviews are below.

Cofounder 145

Cofounder New York City Entrepreneur New York 145

Austin Startup

AUGUST 20, 2017

Early stage startups have to survive one day at a time and are often presented with limited choices of the moment that enable them to continue. At early stages you probably don’t have an assembly line and can’t clearly define any particular job. But, later on they often wish they had the ability to erase many of them.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Software Review Cap Table Securities and Exchange Commission 48

Steve Blank

AUGUST 8, 2016

Ryan Smith co-founded Qualtrics in 2002 with his father in the family basement. Lane also founded Wheelhouse, a Canadian organization that supports other entrepreneurs through mentorship, access to early stage capital, and connections to global business networks and executive expertise. . Clips from their interviews are below.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder New York City Entrepreneur New York 120

ReadWriteStart

APRIL 7, 2011

Since 2002, the law form of Fenwick & West has conducted a venture capital survey, a response to "the burst of the 'dot-come bubble' and a desire to provide the entrepreneurial community with objective information about the status of the venture environment."

Preferred Stock 115

Preferred Stock Silicon Valley Seed Stage Venture Capital 115

View from Seed

JANUARY 11, 2017

Fortunately we proved skeptics wrong and every one of these strategic investors made a tidy 2.5 – 3x return once PayPal IPO’d in 2002 and then was acquired by eBay later that year. All things being equal, seed and early stage startups are not usually well suited to take strategic investments.

Strategic Investors 120

Strategic Investors Post-Money Valuation Seed Stage Cofounder 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

A discounted price is available for early stage entrepreneurs and students. In 2002 I became exposed to the idea of “agile software development&# and subsequently was a first round investor in Rally Software which is now the market leader in Agile application lifecycle management software.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

VC Adventure

JUNE 15, 2011

But what’s going on right now with early stage company valuations suggests that VCs may be poor judges of at least some of these patterns. In 2002 a series of random shootings rocked the Washington DC area. .&# Or so the logic goes.

DC 92

DC Valuation Early Stage Washington 92

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 23, 2011

The idea was right but the timing was early and required a pivot into being a software company. In 2002 after exiting his second company he was attracted to the variety of being a VC. But ultimately great people drive the ideas and Highland Capital is proactive in reaching out to entrepreneurs even at early stages.

Vertical 265

Vertical Curation Boston Burn Rate 265

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

And even more importantly, was there any way to reduce risk in early stage ventures? This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. Is there any way to predict success or failure? That day, alone in the cabin I knew I had to find the answer.

Product Development 143

Product Development Developer Silicon Valley Product 143

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2010

The importance of the conference is that it assembles most of the top privately held early-to-mid-stage technology companies in the country (and some globally) as well as most VC’s, growth equity funds and corporate development departments from large industry players looking at technology acquisitions.

IPO 242

IPO Venture Capital Private Placement Cofounder 242

www.inc.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

In 2002, he stepped gingerly into the work-for-equity arena, with a modest investment in one start-up. Last fall, Arizona Bay launched its own venture capital firm, Arizona Bay Technology Ventures , which will invest from $50,000 to $750,000 in early-stage start-ups. Graham has a different view on the matter.

Arizona 40

Arizona Equity Iowa Venture Capital 40

VC Adventure

JUNE 15, 2011

But what’s going on right now with early stage company valuations suggests that VCs may be poor judges of at least some of these patterns. In 2002 a series of random shootings rocked the Washington DC area. .” Or so the logic goes.

DC 48

DC Valuation Early Stage Washington 48

Cracking the Code

DECEMBER 11, 2015

When Elon Musk received $200 million from the proceeds of the PayPal acquisition in 2002, he re-invested everything to build the next big thing: $100 million in SpaceX and $100 million in Tesla. . #6 Passion While everyone wants to make money, good VCs look for more in an entrepreneur than the desire to cash out.

San Francisco 48

San Francisco Churn Rate Silicon Valley Engineer 48

David Teten

JANUARY 10, 2012

With a unique vision for starting and successfully managing innovative companies, he is the Managing Partner of Social Leverage, a holding company that invests in early stage web businesses. He was named among the World’s Top 100 Young Innovators by MIT Technology Review and received the TR100 award in 2002.

Technical Review 128

Technical Review Technology North Carolina Switzerland 128

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

These three tools allow startups to focus on the parts of an early stage venture that matter the most: the product, product/market fit, customer acquisition, revenue and cost model, channels and partners. Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering.

Oakland 326

Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 326

Duct Tape Marketing

JANUARY 25, 2023

So when Lulu started in 2002, so about 20 years ago, we just celebrated our 20th anniversary. And as a business, you know, a lot of your audience is small business owners or solopreneurs or early stage, you know, entrepreneurs. What you're referring to is the stigma that came with self-publishing.

Audience 88

Audience Revenue Distribution Differentiation 88

Gust

MAY 24, 2012

From the point of view of a venture fund that stands to lose some or all of its investment in a portfolio company, putting up $2 million or $10 million of cold hard cash for the entrepreneur to spend building a risky early-stage, pre-revenue venture, justifies significant preferences and protections that Common Stock holders, who invest only “sweat (..)

IPO 159

IPO Equity Common Stock Stock 159

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

Teams were savvy enough to know that fully formed, completed descriptions of users are an impossibility at the early stages of design. A research-based archetypal representative of your customer based on various attributes, attitudes, and characteristics. Traditional personas began to look too finished, too final.

Software Review 115

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 115

ConversionXL

MARCH 7, 2017

One of the best definitions I’ve found, which expounds a bit more, comes from Tony Zambito circa 2002 : Tony Zambito: Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions.

Software Review 102

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 102

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

By the time of my wedding in July 2002 I was super fit. One doesn’t have to look beyond the most prominent technology bloggers, early-stage Silicon Valley angels or even some of the biggest names in tech (Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff) to find people suffering like I have been. I thought that, too.

Entrepreneur 308

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley San Diego Non-Compete 308

Scalable Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2013

It was very educational for a lot of us to go through the dot-com crash, because you remember, in 2002, like there were a number of universal truths asserted in 2002; the Internet didn’t matter, consumer Internet business was dead.

Software Review 22

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Stock 22

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 22, 2017

When we started our company in 2002 we decided that Sonjara would make a great name for our company or product; meaningful and unusual, as well as easy to pronounce and spell. When my husband Andy and I started dating, I was finishing my Master’s in Anthropology of International Development, where I was focusing on West Africa.

Naming 48

Naming Entrepreneur LLC Software Review 48

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 5, 2013

Homebrew, an early stage venture firm focused on this same revolution has illustrated the following: An engineer or designer gets work by offering his skills via vertical marketplaces. Between 2002 and 2012, enterprises with over 1000 employees lost over one million employees.

Silicon Valley 208

Silicon Valley API Cofounder Salary 208

ConversionXL

JULY 11, 2016

The quote first surfaced in 2002. 3 Growth hacks for early stage startups: Find your scaling lever (HouseTrip, Facebook). People always try to argue with the user feedback strategy by quoting Henry Ford, ““If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” That’s your job.

PPC 48

PPC Analytics Video Non-Compete 48