Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. Most of the startups they invested in either died by running out of money before they found a scalable business model or ended up in the “land of the living dead” by never growing (failing to Pivot.).

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Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 302

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

— 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). Board Control.

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Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 269

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 19, 2019

But in today’s world, speed-to-scale entrepreneurship is what we need to improve society, transform industries, and create massive value for customers, employees, and investors. When the market conditions are right, you should blitzscale for the benefit of all stakeholders: customers, employees, investors, and society.

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Cofounder Business Model IPO Non-Compete 28

Agile VC

MAY 16, 2019

I have friends who are execs or shareholders of the company, but I have no stake in Slack nor intent to invest in the IPO. A somewhat unique thing about the Slack IPO is that they’re pursuing a direct listing on the NYSE. But it does mean that traditional 180 day lock-up periods won’t generally apply to existing Slack shareholders.

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Lock-up Period Retention Azure .Net 100

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Tim Keane

MARCH 9, 2011

Business success is the ultimate goal. But, what constitutes success for the parties involved – investors, entrepreneurs, employees, and customers – can vary dramatically.   If even less cash flow but with the desire to retain the business: Friends and family money on junior debt terms.  five years.). . 

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Finance Bootstrapping Startup Equity 83

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

We’re at 70 people, and we’ll do $40 million in revenue this year and should get to cash flow breakeven this quarter. ” In this first step, the goal of a startup is to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. It sounded like he was living the dream. I was trying to figure out why we were meeting.

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Startup Lean Venture Capital Advisory Board 120

Tim Keane

JANUARY 12, 2010

Next, they carefully consider the range of multiples being used today to value companies being acquired or doing IPOs in the market that the business is in. So, after having built a working business model with a bottom up projection, let’s assume the five year number in this example is $91MM in revenue.

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Term Sheet Valuation Dividend Liquidation Preference 68

View from Seed

JANUARY 24, 2018

For this reason, we’ve partnered with Guild members who have experience across different kinds of customers, business models, and distribution channels. Fareed Mosavat is the product lead for Upgrades and Expansion at Slack, focused on revenue growth for Slack’s small business customers. Back to Top). Back to Top).

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Operations Cofounder Technical Review Angel Investor 176

Agile VC

AUGUST 1, 2012

The best example of this was Facebook’s disclosure during their IPO process back in May that “mobile” usage was increasing significantly but FB’s monetization of mobile users lagged considerably. Gaming is still the largest category, where you see multiple mobile game companies with $100M+ revenue (e.g.

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Mobile Advertising Bandwidth Web 160

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 2, 2018

Without profit, there is no longevity to any business, so I’m always surprised when sincere young entrepreneurs avoid using the term, as if “profit” is a bad word. At the other extreme, I don’t condone greedy and unethical business practices to unjustly shake down customers and employees alike.

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Intellectual Property Initial Public Offering Merger Acquisition 48

infochachkie.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

There is an inherent conflict in a consultant’s business model and the needs of a startup. For instance, if a consultant proposes to help you with public relations, pay them a commission equivalent to the greater of a flat fee per story placed or a percentage of revenue generated from the PR coverage.

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Equity Silicon Valley Cofounder PR 40

Mucker Lab

APRIL 6, 2023

Are there types of companies, market segments, industries, or business models where PLG does not make sense? If you work in B2C or e-commerce, you optimize that Add to Cart flow like crazy because that is your revenue. You still have a revenue goal to hit this quarter, something like that. That’s a PLG motion, right?

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Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

abovethecrowd.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2015

Every successful technology company raises money throughout its lifecycle, perhaps starting with a seed investment and progressing through Series A, B, C, late-stage investments, and, for the most successful companies, an IPO. Lost in this conversation are the dramatic differences between a high priced private round and an IPO.

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IPO Liquidation Preference Valuation Technical Review 40

Hearpreneur

DECEMBER 18, 2020

We were not forced to lay anyone off and actually added employees during the pandemic. 2- A business I built IPO’ed. A business that I built just IPO’ed (yesterday actually and I am still smiling). Accomplishments for 2020 have been daunting for anyone running a business. Thanks to Justin A.

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Connecticut Entrepreneur Technical Review Florida 146

Up and Running

JULY 24, 2015

On Bplans, you’ll find templates, free eBooks, and articles on how to plan and start your business. Business Model Generation. This website offers a downloadable worksheet called a business model canvas that helps you think through your business idea. Business news sites. Business Insider.

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Entrepreneur Small Business Administration SBA Pennsylvania 60

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

we had no revenue. But with so many investors still licking their wounds from the dot-com bust, many focused on proven business models, such as advertising or e-commerce. As a result, we knew that our pitch would need to steer into investors’ biggest concern: the lack of revenue. Investors see a lot of pitches.

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Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

VC Cafe

JANUARY 15, 2024

With the IPO window closed, growth funding severely dwindled and multiples down as a result of the public market, unicorns face tough choices in 2024. With limited options for liquidity (M&A or IPO) and significantly less growth capital, unicorns face an uncertain future. trillion, according to CB Insights.

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IPO Valuation Private Equity 89

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 3, 2012

Facebook and Google would be obvious choices for this, but so much has been written about each of them and they represent such special business models, I worried that it would be both hard for entrepreneurs to relate and hard for me to develop new insights. The first year of revenue (1999) was $4 million – a remarkable achievement.

Distribution 49

Distribution Lean Massachusetts Cofounder 49

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. No business model, either. Almost all of them got scooped up by pre-IPO Google this time. Almost all of them got scooped up by pre-IPO Google this time. And Google? all about luck.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Things Change In 1956 Hewlett Packard (HP) was a 17-year old company with $20 million in test equipment sales with 900 employees. It was still a year away from its IPO. For the first 25 years HP’s business model was static. (I’ll show you the memo in a second. But first some background.)

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Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 182

Up and Running

MAY 1, 2014

If your business model (i.e., “how If you are raising money to start or grow your business, you need to include the details of what you need in the executive summary. You’ll end up with a long, generic statement about how your company is serving its customers, employees, etc. Financial summary. Funding requirements.

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Business Plan Forecast Balance Sheet Distribution 163

Up and Running

APRIL 28, 2015

Your business model has to truly be similar to the company you are referencing. If you aren’t solving some problem in the world, you are going to have a long uphill climb with your business. Slide 5: Revenue model. Some businesses have key strategic partnerships that are critical to their success.

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Forecast Hockey Stick Exit Strategy Intellectual Property 60

www.paulgraham.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Microsofts originalplan was to make money selling programming languages, of all things.Their current business model didnt occur to them until IBM droppedit in their lap five years later. In those days you could go public as adogfood portal, so as a company with a real product and real revenues,we might have done well.

Startup 105

Startup Cofounder Software Stock 105

Agile VC

APRIL 13, 2012

And going even further back there have been a few random ones have been built before like Salesforce.com and e-tailer RedEnvelope (IPO’d in 2003 though now defunct as a company). If my memory serves me, <10% of our pre-IPO employees at PayPal lived in SF and literally 1 of the first 40-50 folks at LinkedIn were city-dwellers.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco San Jose Startup 185

infochachkie.com

DECEMBER 5, 2011

Your company name will also impact your employees’ email addresses. Our name was so disconnected from our business model that we were in the midst of a protracted and expensive name change initiative (along with a small army of consultants), at the time we sold Expertcity to Citrix. John is a CPA and holds an M.B.A.

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Naming Technical Review Product Product Name 40

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 11, 2011

On the topic of business models, Spencer proposed building traffic and then selling the company, which I pushed back on. We spent considerable time exploring ways to verticalize the app and creating an ad-supported business model instead, which would also broaden his exit options considerably. could be your companion.

Silicon Valley 105

Silicon Valley Columbus Ohio Incubator 105

online.wsj.com

SEPTEMBER 23, 2012

If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail, based on Mr. Ghoshs research. At its peak, in 2010, Goodmail had roughly 40 employees. Languishing businesses were counted as survivors.

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Venture Capital Software Review Rhode Island North Dakota 107

Cracking the Code

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

The Deutsche Bank report has a very interesting chart on the topic presenting the Free Cash Flow margins vs. the revenue growth four years post IPO for select software leaders: As you can see, with 20% Free Cash Flow margin and a 50% growth rate, Salesforce is well positioned in the pack! and their 07/08 growth rate was around 13%.

Software Review 48

Software Review Software Technical Review Cloud 48

abovethecrowd.com

JULY 7, 2015

Efficiently communicating your strategy, business model, and competitive differentiation is required for many critical things you will do as a company. It may simply be an expense analysis, or a detailed pricing model, or a TAM (total available market) analysis. You will do business development meetings.

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Warrant Later Stage Forecast IPO 40

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2011

Juno IPO’d while Joel was there, and it was the first “broken&# IPO of the dot-com era. Smart, capable managers would not hesitate to make decisions instead of allowing their employees to make them. He is responsible for bringing in revenue from advertising and their careers offering. 29:45 minutes.

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Software Review Software St. Louis API 285

Austin Startup

MAY 29, 2019

Yesterday I was having a discussion with one of our executives on the strength of network effects inherent in the data.world business model. This led to a far ranging strategic discussion that got us both really excited about the huge potential of our business. check out The Entrepreneur’s Essentials #1 on that front).

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Networking Fractional CTO CTO Hire B2C 48