VC Cafe

MARCH 1, 2024

Most startups equate the process of fundraising to dating – founders have to typically kiss a lot of frogs until the find the right fit. Eliminating middlemen in healthcare – from using AI to automate repetitive human jobs to exploring new and better business models for providing care.

Artificial Inteligence 176

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Software Review Generative AI 176

The Startup Magazine

AUGUST 11, 2023

pexels A war chest is virtually always a competitive edge in all aspects that count, including employing key staff, public relations, marketing, and sales. When expanding their businesses, most tech startups and the subindustries that comprise the tech industry typically follow this model. Hence they will miss the finish line.

Seed Stage 126

Seed Stage Technical Review Early Stage Due Diligence 126

Steve Blank

MARCH 16, 2016

To most founders a startup is not a job, but a calling. Founders can now access the largest pool of risk capital that ever existed –in the form of Private Equity (Angel Investors, family offices , Venture Capitalists (VC’s) and Hedge Funds.). (BTW, What does this mean for startup founders? Here’s the thing most founders miss.

Liquidity Event 120

Liquidity Event Founder Liquidation Preference Venture Capital 120

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

SEPTEMBER 17, 2022

This is Vested Capital episode 32, featuring Thomas Smale, the founder of FE International, a leading M&A firm. Now that number is over a billion dollars in business acquisitions. The post Thomas Smale, Over A Billion Dollars In Company Sales, What Business Models Lead To The Biggest Exit (VC EP32) appeared first on Yaro.Blog.

Business Model 98

Business Model Vesting Sales Acquisition 98

Gust

JANUARY 5, 2014

This rather crude expression weighs heavily on the mind of all good startup founders, no matter how confident they appear. The real milestone, proving the business model, is that first product sold for full price to a total stranger, leaving him happy. Your revenue model has to make sense.

Business Model 171

Business Model Sales Customer Distribution 171

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 4, 2014

If there’s a sure sign that shows how interest in online flash sales have waned, it’s how many daily deal sites have either deadpooled or pivoted away from that particular business model. In the News business model daily deals flash sales luxury travel Singapore TheLuxeNomad'

Flash 155

Flash Business Model Sales Singapore 155

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 4, 2011

This rather crude expression weighs heavily on the mind of all good startup founders, no matter how confident they appear. The real milestone, proving the business model, is that first product sold for full price to a total stranger, leaving him happy. Your revenue model has to make sense.

Business Model 244

Business Model Sales Customer Distribution 244

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 22, 2021

How do you convince investors that your business model will really work, before you have a revenue stream that exceeds your expenses? Even if you are bootstrapping your business, and you are the only investor, you should be asking yourself the same question. Word of mouth is not adequate for marketing and sales.

Business Model 414

Business Model Angel Investor Bootstrapping Revenue 414

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

When Sloan arrived at GM in 1920 he realized that the traditional centralized management structures organized by function (sales, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing) were a poor fit for managing GM’s diverse product lines. If you’re following Tesla, you might be interested to know that Sloan wasn’t the founder of GM.

Michigan 268

Michigan Cofounder Stock Forecast 268

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. You can’t be an effective founder or in the C-suite of a startup if you don’t hold any. And he proceeded to lay out a fairly complex and innovative sales and marketing strategy for our next 18 months.

Business Model 305

Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 305

NZ Entrepreneur

OCTOBER 22, 2019

Founders’ Chat is a series where we share the entrepreneurial journey of founders from the GridAKL start-up hub. As a startup founder, your time and resources tend to be limited. Kiwi businesses paid $750 million+ in electronic card transaction fees in 2018 alone. NZ Sales Manager. Australian Sales Leader.

Founder 46

Founder Cofounder Design Sales 46

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 16, 2020

For example, a rapidly growing business is often purchasing lots of inventory, investing in fixed assets, and not managing their accounts receivable. If your business model is profitable but you’ve mismanaged one of the above categories, you need to build a 13-week cash forecast to manage your short-term crisis.

Recapitalization 172

Recapitalization Forecast Software Review Finance 172

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2014

Kauffman just launched Founders School - a new education series to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses during the startup stage by highlighting how startups are different from big companies. After weeks honing the script and days of filming, I’m honored to present the “ Startups ” section of Founders School.

Founder 327

Founder Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 327

Austin Startup

MARCH 13, 2020

Since then, we’ve served 500+ unique customers, worked with 10+ space partners, pivoted our business model from B2C to B2B, signed on advisers, and have raised money from outside investors. Your partner matters To all those solo-founders out there?—?kudos kudos to ya’ll. That’s why when you get wins, celebrate them!

B2C 62

B2C Austin B2B Cofounder 62

The Startup Magazine

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

Arif Bhalwani is the co-founder and CEO of Third Eye Capital (TEC) in Toronto, Canada. The goal is to transform dormant or underutilized assets into active capital that supports your business. It is also the time to take a hard look at your business model. The firm has made more than $4.5

Technical Review 134

Technical Review Due Diligence Bankruptcy Intellectual Property 134

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 29, 2012

Yet I continue to see business plans, or even talk to founders, and can’t find the specifics of the business model anywhere. As Guy Kawasaki says in his book “ The Art of the Start ,” if you can’t describe your business model in ten words or less, you don’t have a business model.

Business Model 238

Business Model eCommerce Business Plan Revenue 238

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 6, 2011

In both cases, the founder and I brainstormed on ways to shift the product in order to get closer to what I perceived as something that would be great. In both cases, the answer was that the founder would go to find other ideas, turn those into paper descriptions and validate it with customers. Customer Validation 101.

Customer 227

Customer Fractional CTO Viral Lean 227

ReadWriteStart

JULY 12, 2012

For instance, a tech whiz with no sales skills needs to have a strong salesperson on board to land investors. Successful businesses often have one thing in common: The management team has carefully designated roles. Everyone’s heard startup advice about the importance of having a balanced management team. The 3 Types of Intelligence.

Founder 144

Founder Silicon Valley Startup Leadership 144

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 20, 2015

How do you convince investors that your business model will really work, before you have a revenue stream that exceeds your expenses? Even if you are bootstrapping your business, and you are the only investor, you should be asking yourself the same question. Word of mouth is not adequate for marketing and sales.

Business Model 120

Business Model Angel Investor Startup Bootstrapping 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. In Discovery startups take all their hypotheses about the business model: product, market, customers, channel, etc. What does this have to do with missing your sales plan?

Burn Rate 248

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 248

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

Depending on the composition of the founding team, you might or might not have near-term holes in certain functions at the exec level – e.g. you’ll most likely need to bring on a CTO/VP of Engineering shortly after the seed round if you don’t have a technical co-founder.

Part-Time VPE 195

Part-Time VPE Seed Stage CTO Hire Forecast 195

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 21, 2023

Savvy investors tell me that startup founders who claim to have never failed are either lying or have never tried anything innovative. A technical champion may drive a specific innovation, but the business leader has to own the result, in order to drive an appropriate business model, customer acquisition, support, and a growth strategy.

Intellectual Property 343

Intellectual Property Metrics .Net Social Network 343

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. The next customer segment we tried was startup founders.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 21, 2020

No surprise during an economic crisis, over 81% of business owners are prioritizing cash flow management and are identifying ways to cut back spending and increase sales, namely by moving services online. Kathryn Petralia is the President and Co-Founder of Kabbage , an American Express Company. Cash Flow is Top of Mind.

Small Business 136

Small Business Cofounder United States Technical Review 136

Steve Blank

APRIL 8, 2010

He and his co-founder were both PhD’s in applied math who believe they can make some serious inroads on next generation search. Why a business plan is different than a business model. Instead of writing a full-fledged business plan, they had focused on building and testing a business model.

Business Model 328

Business Model Business Plan Customer Cap Table 328

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

I had joined MIPS Computers, my second semiconductor company , as the VP of marketing and also took on the role of the acting VP of Sales. and get the chip designed into companies building engineering workstations – powerful personal computers, all while trying to refine how to find the right markets, customers, and sales process.

Part-Time VPE 333

Part-Time VPE Employee Cofounder Community 333

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 10, 2017

by Mark Gilbert, founder and CEO of MBS Accounting Technology & Advisory. Roughly 27 percent of startups can’t get the funding they need to take their business to the next level, according to the National Association of Small Businesses. Founders overlook how their salary looks to investors. >Investors

Software Review 109

Software Review Technical Review Due Diligence Startup 109

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Try innovating inside a large company where 99% of the company is executing the current business model, while you’re trying to figure out and build what comes next. Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups? You think startups are hard? Is it that some CEOs are better than others?

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 23, 2012

This rather crude expression weighs heavily on the mind of all good startup founders, no matter how confident they appear. The real milestone, proving the business model, is that first product sold for full price to a total stranger, leaving him happy. Your revenue model has to make sense.

Sales 240

Sales Customer Business Model Distribution 240

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

I''ve been thinking a lot lately about scaling sales. . Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. How do I build a repeatable, scalable sales process that is like an industrial machine - not a crafts project? 1) Enterprise Sales.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 4, 2019

Key components of revenue architecture go beyond simply predicting sales to include: the name and attributes of the startup’s category, a messaging matrix, a pricing strategy, a sales strategy and other business model elements. We advise founders and teams to build systems and processes with the right foundation early.

Framework 118

Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 118

NZ Entrepreneur

SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

Startup founders are our ambitious problem solvers. experiments to build a product, find customers, test business models and hire amazing people. experiments to build a product, find customers, test business models and hire amazing people. Underpinning this growth is good governance. Risk and reward.

Technical Review 88

Technical Review Software Review New Zealand Due Diligence 88

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 30, 2021

Yet there are big challenges to hyperlocal, at least for consumer-focused hyperlocal startups, according to Sean Barkulis, Founder of UPlanMe, whose initial consumer-focused business model was an early casualty, writing in Street Fight : Every site requires real curated local content to engage users. Look for new ways to sell.

Finder 361

Finder Startup Curation Seattle 361

Up and Running

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

That’s because obtaining a pre-money valuation for a concept level technology company in excess of $1 million is difficult, particularly for a startup founder without a proven track record. By contrast, obtaining a pre-money valuation of $5 million for a business with a new viable product and even very minimal sales is somewhat reasonable.

Private Equity 94

Private Equity Pre-Money Valuation Equity Startup 94

This is going to be BIG.

MAY 26, 2022

“Personal Branding” The term is fingernails on a chalkboard-level cringe for many of the best founders—mostly because it feels most of the people who spend time building their personal brand don’t actually have much there there behind it. Unfortunately, this has real consequences for founders. So how can founders differentiate?

Founder 103

Founder .Net Term Sheet Aggregator 103

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. Oh yes, and retail sales doubled with the new product packaging.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

ConversionXL

JUNE 2, 2022

DocuSign combines both to fuel its sales funnel. ABM is a company-wide strategic approach to finding and converting specific accounts that add long-term value to your business, both financially and through industry standing and pulling power. Alignment can make all the difference to a business. The result?

Lead Generation 94

Lead Generation Marketing Sales Cycle Campaign 94