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Why Uber is The Revenge of the Founders

Steve Blank

— 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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Why good people leave large tech companies

Steve Blank

The belief then was that most founders couldn’t acquire the HR, finance, sales, and board governance skills rapidly enough to steer the company to a liquidity event, so they hired professional managers. These new CEOs would also act as a brake to temper the founder’s excesses.

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Rally Software Acquired By CA Technologies for $480 Million

Feld Thoughts

For example, from a post in 2008 about Rally’s $16.85m financing , I riffed on the origins of the company. About a year after he got started, he was ready to raise a venture financing. Ryan was encouraged to team up with Tim and shortly after that happened we co-led the first round VC financing with Boulder Ventures.

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Why Do Consumer IPOs and B2B IPOs Get Treated Differently?

Agile VC

2019 is off to an exciting start for IPOs of VC-backed startups. In some respects though Zoom has had the most “successful” IPO of the three companies, which has surprised some folks. In the last decade or so, high profile consumer IPOs have often gotten lofty valuations. Reading Time: 3 minutes.

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Putting Twitter’s IPO in Perspective

Agile VC

Twitter’s IPO has garnered a ton of attention in the tech and popular press. So their revenue figures, pre IPO financing and ownership, and other info is all widely available. Growth IPOs Are Back. From Google Finance. Instagram hadn’t built a true business (e.g. A couple things factor into this.

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Innovation, Change and the Rest of Your Life

Steve Blank

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. A 20 th century VC was likely to have an MBA or finance background. The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. (And

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Square IPO: Is Square A Good Payments Business?

Agile VC

Square filed its S-1 several weeks ago and is now in the middle of its IPO road show process. This past Friday Square also filed an initial pricing range of $11-13/sh which would give them an enterprise value less than their last round of financing ($6B post-money). The post Square IPO: Is Square A Good Payments Business?

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