Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 5, 2018
Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits. First Movers” didn’t understand customer problems or the product features that solved those problems (what we now call product-market fit). IPOs dried up.
View from Seed
OCTOBER 24, 2019
As a first time founder, having a few million dollars in the bank after a successful seed raise may seem like a huge amount of capital, and it’s easy to lose discipline around your burn rate. Unlike in B2B, you don’t necessarily want to use a second-seed round to get to metrics that every investor will appreciate.
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Feld Thoughts
NOVEMBER 18, 2013
Early customer development talks are going great which keeps the team really excited. Three months in, the burn is now at $70k/month. No updates, screen comps, or metrics have been publicly shared yet. This is all a part of the normal product and customer development process,” the CEO tells the team.
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 22, 2010
If you are following Customer Development , the answer is easy. Board meetings are about measuring progress measured against the hypotheses in Customer Discovery and Validation. Do the metrics show that the business model you’re creating will support the company you’re trying to become? Startup Metrics.
Startup Lessons Learned
JANUARY 30, 2009
Worse was the large staff in departments appropriate to a mainstream-scale product, especially in customer service and QA. The passionate early adopters who flocked to the product at its launch could not sustain this outsized burn rate. We can capitalize on new customers.
Startup Lessons Learned
MARCH 27, 2009
The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). Were talking PayPal -sized variations.
Steve Blank
JUNE 1, 2011
The Wrong Metrics. Traditional startup board meetings spend an insane amount of wasted time using Fortune 100 company metrics like income statements, cash flow, balance sheet, waterfall charts. The only numbers in those documents that are important in the first year of a startup’s life are burn rate and cash balance.
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