Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

In times when venture capital is hard to get, investors extract high costs for failure (down-rounds, cram downs , new management teams, shut down the company.) Sales people cost money, and when they’re not bringing in revenue, their wandering in the woods is time consuming, cash-draining and demoralizing. Who recommends a sale?

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 16, 2013

The company with no revenue and a $150k burn rate that raised $2.5 I often wonder why they didn’t find a way to bring in some revenue to cover costs. I have this conversation all the time. If we do that and you lower your burn rate then you’ll have more time to prove things out before we fund raise.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 25, 2019

What should the cash burn rate of the company be and how long of a cash runway should the company maintain? Should we cut costs, do layoffs, close divisions and focus scare resources on fewer projects? We do lunch where everybody has a casual conversation followed by 6 hours of content and discussion.

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LP Startup Burn Rate Stock Options 269

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 17, 2019

Startups are regarded for their embrace of industry disruption, all the while constantly trying to limit their burn rate and conserving their capital for future growth. They encourage users to stick with content until the end, enjoy successful lead conversion and prompt social media sharing – all in one easy to create experience.

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 9, 2011

The parallels to the music industry are too obvious even though the industry players, the medium and the cost structures are different. Companies raised too much money in 2005-08 and had high burn rates. Maybe he’ll reveal our conversation when he announced. I have always believed that TV was ripe for disruption.

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Stock Technical Review Marketing Greece 305

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 4, 2016

note: to follow realtime conversations & engage with me on Facebook you can follow me here: https://www.facebook.com/msuster ]. My conversations with LPs tell me that 2016 is one of their business calendars in years and unless we see an unexpected, sudden downturn expect the market size in 2016 to remain at current levels or increase.

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LP Valuation Burn Rate Pre-Money Valuation 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 6, 2017

This past year was also the year that startup boards also got more disciplined about containing burn rates and pushing for companies to be run more pragmatically. With nearly 2/3rd of all VCs citing cost-cutting in 2016 as the norm — this is a clear indication that winter made an appearance.

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Venture Capital Saudi Arabia Kuwait Burn Rate 150

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

The Startup Death Spiral: The Cost of Getting Product Launch Wrong By the time of first customer ship, if a startup does not understand its market and customers, failure unfolds in a stylized ritual, almost like a Japanese Noh play. Just had a conversation today with a student taking Steve’s class. Absolutely priceless.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

An interesting phenomena of the 1920s that illustrates the fragility and cost of vacuum tubes is the “Reflex Receiver&# design methodology. There are serious negative trade-off costs with using reflex designs but compared to the economic costs of each vacuum tube, it was a justified trade-off. Armstrong was a god!

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

If you hire 6 senior sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business 6 months. They don’t want high burn rates but they will never fund slow growth. COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

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Stock Options Startup Dilution Venture Capital 227

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 11, 2017

For example, I use Uber rather than regular cabs because the driver arrives in less than 5 minutes, I don’t need to have cash or pay by credit card, I know in advance how much it will cost and who will be the driver. The “burn rate” indicates how much money a company is losing over a given period of time.

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Up and Running

AUGUST 21, 2014

It’s hard to understand how many people will you actually attract, what is it going to cost, what’s your conversion rate, how long will people stay. You’re going to want to really think about how you’re going to drive traffic and what’s most cost effective.

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Metrics Startup Churn Rate Forecast 84

This is going to be BIG.

MARCH 1, 2010

Even in the Valley, it will cost you over 20k to pay to recruit a developer. If you want to build your startup in the middle of nowhere and optimize purely for low burn rate, then sure, I’m sure you could work more cheaply elsewhere. That being said, is low burn rate really what you should be optimizing for?

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New York City New York Startup Burn Rate 113

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 13, 2013

I started as a programmer, and then a database designer, and then a project manager, and I led conversion teams. And for every time I’ve felt hugely stressed that our burn rate was getting too high, and I didn’t know who else was going to fund the company, and I’m all in on this company, right?”

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View from Seed

OCTOBER 15, 2014

Include both positives and negatives for a more productive board conversation, which is especially critical in the seed stage since nearly everything is in “figure it out” mode. Section 1: “High Level Summary” This is a short section that we’d recommend structuring in one of two ways.

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abovethecrowd.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2015

Lost in this conversation are the dramatic differences between a high priced private round and an IPO. Conversely, these late stage private rounds have no such pageantry or process. Many companies embed costs that are truly variable (for instance customer support, marketing, credit card processing) below the gross margin line.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 15, 2020

You can listen to our conversation on Apple Podcasts , Google podcasts , or wherever else you like to download podcasts. You can find my conversation with Mark in that format below. Here's my conversation with Mark Cuban. We'd had conversations, not knowing that that game was going to be played that night.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2016

In other words, it isn’t that VCs suddenly got smart, it’s that the costs of starting a company went down dramatically. So in companies with high burn rates you can find the following: Seed funds wanting to sell the company / get a return or growth investors pushing for a recap or massive down round. Rise of Angels.

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Venture Capital Silicon Valley Burn Rate LP 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2020

The human toll a virus could inflict and the immense economic cost of the emergency response stayed with him. You can listen to our conversation on Apple , Google, or wherever you like to download podcasts. In addition, a complete transcript of our conversation follows the show resources below.

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Feld Thoughts

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

Much of it is very short term focused and, like a giant tractor beam, draws the conversation into a very short time horizon (as in days or weeks). One of my favorite lines in buried in the middle: “I’ve heard enough companies say “we simply can’t cut costs or it will hurt the long-term potential of the business” to get a wry smile.

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Cap Table Down Round Liquidation Preference Founder 70

Hearpreneur

JULY 7, 2019

Entrepreneurs have the ability to redefine the conversation while creating a customer-centric way of moving the world and our lives forward. By outsourcing, entrepreneurs are adding professionals to their team, virtually, for a fraction of the costs. 5- Decline in cost of starting a business. Thanks to Ira.M.

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Hippoland

FEBRUARY 21, 2016

I really do want to help, and I think highly of an entrepreneur who can bring people together with a tough conversation. You should also include your burn rate and runway. The flip side is that if an entrepreneur rallies everyone together and says, “Hey look, this situation is not going well, can you all help with ABC?”,

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www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

created a vastly higher cost structure; I had 80 people mostly on base salaries under $100,000 and was bringing in revenue at the rate of $20 million annually. Contributing to the high cost structure was the new culture of working 9-5 Monday through Friday. Title: Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet.

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VC Cafe

JULY 6, 2010

It also has synching services that usually cost money. Our burn rate is very low and the technology is very scalable. We’re currently having conversation with partners in that area. The problem of iTunes, Picasa and Bitorrent is that they are designed to the desktop. Libox is designed for integration for all your devices.

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