Austin Startup

JULY 6, 2018

Ask the Users Startup Accelerators: Bundled and Unbundled Over the past several years, accelerators have emerged as a powerful filtering and signaling mechanism in early-stage startup ecosystems, allowing high-potential young startups to connect with investors, advisors, and other strategic partners far faster and more efficiently than before.

Dilution 48

Dilution Startup Technical Review Equity 48

abovethecrowd.com

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

Aggregating suppliers is a necessary, but insufficient step on its own. You must also organically aggregate demand. Great marketplaces do not simply aggregate a market; they enhance it. Facilitating work-flow reduces work for the participants, as well as increasing switching costs. High Fragmentation.

Aggregator 101

Aggregator Marketing Software Review North America 101

Gust

JANUARY 4, 2012

How much risk do IP issues in the aggregate pose to our business ? The only exceptions that come to mind are if the IP seems likely to provoke costly litigation, costs too much to develop, or taints the startup with some kind of ties to other ventures or people that give it a checkered past. In practice, this leads many U.S.

Intellectual Property 143

Intellectual Property IP Startup United States 143

David Teten

FEBRUARY 26, 2012

Please note that we expect our members to invest at least $25,000/year in early-stage investments, although there is no contractual commitment to do so. The company aggregates a tremendous amount of medical news and research and personalizes it into a user friendly experience. Docphin ( [link] ) is the Bloomberg for doctors.

Technical Review 128

Technical Review New York Accredited Investor IP 128

ReadWriteStart

SEPTEMBER 3, 2010

plus it's faster and costs half as much ), it ranks first in the world for number of blogs per Internet user, and has a formidable market of Internet consumers who spent €5.5 OSEO validation in turn makes early-stage startups eligible for a variety of support services and funding options.

France 163

France Technical Review Incubator Early Stage 163

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

Agora’s selling points are its ability to reduce users’ IT infrastructure cost and enhance revenue for service providers. Veritas is making a low cost, residential wind turbine. It will be an improvement over mammography by detecting abnormal cells in an early stage, is radiation-free, and is 2-5 times less expensive than mammographs.

Lean 300

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 300

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

Cost pressures are unrelenting in every sector, with pressure on prices and margins continuing to increase. Early stage Venture Capital for medical device startups has dried up. Exits have remained within about the same, while the cost and time to exit have doubled. Business Model Issues. Venture Capital Issues.

Startup 296

Startup Venture Capital Lean IPO 296

Venture Chronicles

MAY 26, 2010

This is why early stage companies that raise a lot of capital are valued richly, it’s a compromise between the company and investors summed up as “I know you will only sell 40% of the equity but you need a pretty big chunk of capital so we’ll give you $10m and value you at $15m pre money instead of $5m&#.

Lean 40

Lean Early Stage Valuation Startup 40

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? They know how much it costs to bring in a customer and they know how much money they can expect to make on each one.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

David Teten

MAY 8, 2012

As Steve Case has said, it’s ridiculous that anyone can gamble and be guaranteed to lose money, but there are strict regulations around who can invest in early-stage private companies and earn (in some cases) a 27% IRR on their capital. *. The Entrepreneurs Access to Capital Act helps to redress this.

Securities and Exchange Commission 148

Securities and Exchange Commission IRR Entrepreneur Angel Investor 148

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 1, 2009

There’s no doubt (at least anecdotally) that the pace of VC investments in early-stage technology companies has picked up in the past few months. I hear from several sources that Sequoia is very active in the market aggressively chasing several deals and even driving up prices on some early-stage deals.

IPO 255

IPO Investment Bankers Venture Capital Marketing 255

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

It’s entirely possible for the startup to be a massive success without having large aggregate numbers, because the startup has succeeded in finding a passionate, but small, early adopter base that has tremendous per-customer behavior. But proving your assumptions with early adopters is an essential first step. But $10.00?

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

ConversionXL

JULY 29, 2015

So you might be paying higher costs with those projects too. Most project creators describe their project using aggregate framing. To alleviate that blindness, separate the project into specific costs. None of those rewards cost money. Yet they incentive people to donate, even in the early stages of a campaign.

Campaign 48

Campaign Reputation Metrics Naming 48

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 26, 2013

in 2013, with aggregate proceeds of over $38 billion. Funding for early-stage startups is more available than ever. Cost of entry for a startup is at an all-time low. According to a report just out, a record 156 operating companies went public in the U.S. No wonder 90% of the successful startups still bootstrap.

IPO 273

IPO Entrepreneur Social Media Startup 273

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

And if we want them to understand what life outside the classroom in an early stage venture will look like, then they need to experience chaos, conflicting data, uncertainty and good-enough decision-making for 10 confusing weeks. Life will be like that – in a startup, you’d either be talking about shutting down or pivoting like mad.”.

Eritrea 255

Eritrea Lean Libya Silicon Valley 255

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

And if we want them to understand what life outside the classroom in an early stage venture will look like, then they need to experience chaos, conflicting data, uncertainty and good-enough decision-making for 10 confusing weeks. Life will be like that – in a startup, you’d either be talking about shutting down or pivoting like mad.”.

Eritrea 255

Eritrea Lean Libya Silicon Valley 255

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 2, 2020

This approach works well in the early stages of your SaaS company. It also aggregates all the data from the survey so you can see which cancellation reasons are most common, and which cost you the most revenue. Here’s an another example from Pat Walls, founder of Pigeon. Short, clear and simple.

Retention 83

Retention Email Customer Aggregator 83

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. That’s why early stage companies aren’t run by accountants with spreadsheets.

Silicon Valley 188

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 188

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Data companies focused on early-stage startups include Aingel , fundsUP , Preseries , PredictLeads , and Sploda. The Pocket Negotiator is very early-stage attempt to aid in the negotiating process itself. Capital has built a free online tool for founders to calculate their cost of capital.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Duct Tape Marketing

SEPTEMBER 25, 2015

However, I can share the key startup marketing learnings from founding a marketing agency that serves early stage San Francisco startups. The talent and experience of the founder and team play a huge part in the customer’s decision-making process because an early stage startup does not have much in the terms of a business record.

Customer 28

Customer San Francisco Early Stage Aggregator 28

Agile VC

MARCH 8, 2012

What are the implications for other late-stage private companies thinking of making the transition to public markets in the near to midterm future? What’s the impact for early-stage startups? I see several dynamics at work in today’s IPO markets. Author howerl. Filed under Uncategorized.

IPO 100

IPO Silicon Valley Revenue Seed Stage 100

View from Seed

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Aggregate VC investment in 2009 hits a low of roughly $20B, a figure last seen in 2003 in the wake of the bursting of the dotcom and telecom bubble and 2001 recession. And even for early stage startups, VCs raise eyebrows at companies that have modest gross margins. We’re only a few months past Sequoia’s famous “R.I.P.

IPO 202

IPO Early Stage Cofounder B2C 202

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Working backwards means looking at the components that make up Profitability: Profits (EBITDA) = Revenue – Cost of Goods Sold – Expenses So to focus the management team on driving profitability, we should also track and measure Revenue, CoGS, and Expenses. Let’s take the first of these, Profitability, and work backwards. Obvious, isn’t it?

Metrics 55

Metrics Design Entrepreneur Startup 55

ConversionXL

APRIL 10, 2019

Some of the tools below track dozens of metrics—even aggregating them into broader field “health” metrics—and visualize those metrics in clear reports. The cost of the paid version scales based on the number of users, starting at $99 per month (50,000 users) and ranging upward to $479 per month (500,000 users). Inspectlet.

Analytics 130

Analytics Metrics United Kingdom Software 130

www.seriesseed.com

MARCH 2, 2010

Mahatma Gandhi I hesitate to use a quote from one of the greatest people ever to grace planet earth, and certainly the question of how to structure early stage investment is a laughable cause as compared to the rights that Ghandi (also a lawyer) fought to advance.  I’ve attached version 2.0

Finance 58

Finance Term Sheet Equity Aggregator 58

Occam's Razor

MAY 2, 2017

Remember: All data in aggregate is crap, segment or suck. Always adapt to what’s most important and sensible for you (and remember that nothing is free, every measurement decision you make has a cost!). What if you are a tiny local business in a narrow niche, should you use the same approach as Betabrand? Make tough choices.

Metrics 141

Metrics Acquisition eCommerce Analytics 141

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 29, 2011

If you don’t want to read that post, the summary is: Open source computing drove computing costs down 90%, which spurred innovation in technology. Open cloud led by Amazon with their AWS services drove total operating costs down by 90%. So VCs spent a couple of years experimenting with earlier-stage investing, which is OK.

Venture Capital 296

Venture Capital Software LP Early Stage 296

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 13, 2011

You may choose some where your customers aggregate, others where you hope to find biz dev partners & still others where you want to meet investors. Final tip, sometimes a dinner can be too expensive for an early-stage company yet picking a killer venue is one of the best ways to bagsy high-profile people.

Technical Review 289

Technical Review Audience Austin Aggregator 289

Agile VC

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Aggregate VC investment in 2009 hits a low of roughly $20B, a figure last seen in 2003 in the wake of the bursting of the dotcom and telecom bubble and 2001 recession. And even for early stage startups, VCs raise eyebrows at companies that have modest gross margins. We’re only a few months past Sequoia’s famous “R.I.P.

IPO 100

IPO Early Stage Cofounder B2C 100

abovethecrowd.com

OCTOBER 1, 2013

I rarely meet a company that hasn’t experimented with AdWords in some way, and most of those that do understand the basic math around the cost of customer acquisition. The good news is that if you can master them at this early stage, you will have a significant competitive advantage.

Metrics 93

Metrics Conversion Internet Acquisition 93

David Teten

JUNE 1, 2011

Deal aggregation websites Increasing in popularity, trying to increase market efficiency. Teten question: What will the impact be of deal aggregating websites (Axialmarket, MergerID, PE-Nexus, PEGBASE, CapitalSphere, DealMarket, BizBuySell,) on the investment banking industry? Intermediaries. Join the right clubs.

Private Equity 122

Private Equity Deal Flow Equity Developer 122

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 327

Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 327

David Teten

NOVEMBER 15, 2013

It is mathematically impossible for the median investor to beat a low-cost index, after expenses. (Of This may make sense from the individual perspective of a given VC, but collectively it ensures that early-stage companies are overvalued. In aggregate, angels are significant investors.

Management 114

Management Pre-Money Valuation Venture Capital New Hampshire 114

abovethecrowd.com

APRIL 20, 2016

Many have noted that the aggregate shareholder value created by all of the Unicorns will vastly overshadow the losses from the inevitable failed unicorns. Never in the history of venture capital have early stage startups had access to so much capital. If you over-fund the industry, aggregate returns fall.

IPO 40

IPO Term Sheet Silicon Valley Valuation 40

VC Cafe

JULY 15, 2011

We wrote about the VentureGeeks incubator on VC Cafe a few months ago, and its plans to set up a $2 million early stage fund making pre-seed investments. The cost for the startups is 10% of their equity, which is taken by the fund GeekVentures I as payment. They plan to scale by using ecommerce aggregators as affiliates.

Incubator 99

Incubator Startup Florida 99

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. Tony P great, though meebo’s place as a “successful&# start up is still open to debate – from consumer IM aggregator to white label IM, still not making big $$.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

VC Adventure

FEBRUARY 23, 2010

The conference will also feature a Technology Showcase, an inaugural demonstration of five very early stage technology companies that is designed to feature the next generation of innovation from the region and further VCIR’s legacy of entrepreneurial mentorship. TopSchool, Inc.

Venture Capital 52

Venture Capital Colorado Mezzanine Wyoming 52