Seeing Both Sides

JULY 22, 2012

Over a year and a half ago, I did a two-part blog post on the East Coast IPO malaise – one focused on Boston (Massachusetts more broadly), another focused on New York. On the heels of the successful Kayak IPO, I thought I would do a retrospective look back. Meanwhile, not a single New York technology IPO has taken place.

Boston 52

Boston IPO Technical Review New York 52

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 22, 2020

For example, if you have a proven product, real revenue, a big potential market, and are ready to scale up the business, every investor will be interested. At this point, most Angel investors and a few early-stage VCs will be happy to talk, assuming you have the business model validated, and a large opportunity.

Angel Investor 370

Angel Investor Intellectual Property Investment Bankers Private Equity 370

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

To do this they have to accomplish five things; 1) get deal flow – via networking and legwork, they identify likely industries, companies and teams with the potential for rapid growth (less than 10 years), 2) evaluate those companies and teams on the basis of technology, market opportunity, and team.

Silicon Valley 235

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

More and more startups are pursuing Revenue-Based VCs , but “RBI” doesn’t fit everyone. Flexible VC 101: Equity Meets Revenue Share. By tying payments to actual revenues, founders and investors remain aligned around the company’s real-time performance, good or bad. Flexible VC: Revenue -based. Of the Inc.

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

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. Continuous innovation requires the imagination and courage to challenge the initial hypotheses of your current business model (channel, cost, customers, products, supply chain, etc.)

Restful 243

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 243

Growthink Blog

DECEMBER 27, 2017

In describing the competitive landscape, show how your business model creates competitive advantages, and – more importantly – defensible barriers to entry. Financial Plan Goal of the financial plan: Explain how your business will generate returns for your investors. Detail all revenue streams. market research).

Venture Capital 129

Venture Capital Business Plan Technical Review Private Placement 129

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

This gave me an idea: I could help many more entrepreneurs by making the deck available not just to the Greylock network of entrepreneurs, but to everyone. Friendster’s valuation set the tone for the entire social networking space. we had no revenue. The graphic we chose emphasizes that it is a network of people.

Entrepreneur 111

Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

Austin Startup

MAY 10, 2021

three companies he previously worked for had successful exits including two acquisitions and one IPO. Georgoff also held senior positions during critical growth periods for both Redbox and RetailMeNot, where he helped drive increased revenue growth through his leadership roles in strategy, marketing, and product.

Hiring 104

Hiring Product United States Startup 104

Hearpreneur

DECEMBER 18, 2020

2- A business I built IPO’ed. A business that I built just IPO’ed (yesterday actually and I am still smiling). I would say this is what I am most proud of but I am also proud of the traction that my new business has built in its first full year of operation. Thanks to Justin A. Hill, Hill Law Firm ! #2-

Connecticut 145

Connecticut Entrepreneur Technical Review Florida 145

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Dot.com Bubble ( 1995-2000): “ Anything goes” as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability. VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter.

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 19, 2018

For example, if you have a proven product, real revenue, a big potential market, and are ready to scale up the business, every investor will be interested. At this point, most Angel investors and a few early-stage VCs will be happy to talk, assuming you have the business model validated, and a large opportunity.

Angel Investor 184

Angel Investor Intellectual Property Investment Bankers Private Equity 184

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 The three drivers of growth for your business model. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?) He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 19, 2019

And from a financial perspective, any investor would be better off buying stock in Amazon than buying and share of a corner bookshop; if you invested $100 in Amazon’s 1997 initial public offering (IPO), those shares would have been worth about $120,000 in 2018. It’s a great business. It still serves just 60 customers per day.

Cofounder 28

Cofounder Business Model IPO Non-Compete 28

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 4, 2014

For example, if you have a proven product, real revenue, a big potential market, and are ready to scale up the business, every investor will be interested. At this point, most Angel investors and a few early-stage VCs will be happy to talk, assuming you have the business model validated, and a large opportunity.

Angel Investor 232

Angel Investor Intellectual Property Investment Bankers Private Equity 232

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 13, 2016

For example, if you have a proven product, real revenue, a big potential market, and are ready to scale up the business, every investor will be interested. At this point, most Angel investors and a few early-stage VCs will be happy to talk, assuming you have the business model validated, and a large opportunity.

Matching 120

Matching Angel Investor Intellectual Property Investment Bankers 120

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 13, 2012

Clearly define the customer, channel, and revenue model associated with this solution. Explain the business model. In this section, you need to be passionate about revenue, profit, and volume growth. Project both revenues and expense totals for next five years, and past three years, if relevant.

Business Plan 283

Business Plan Sweat Equity Exit Strategy Intellectual Property 283

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Fairchild Semiconductor became the progenitor of a flood of Silicon Valley chip companies and at the same time the adoption of the limited partnership as the model for Venture Firms gave VC’s their own profitable business model. In 1980 Genentech became the first IPO of a venture funded biotech company.

Lean 263

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 263

Agile VC

MAY 22, 2014

Unfortunately Alibaba doesn’t actually break out revenue by marketplace or business unit. Tmall (storefronts for larger, branded merchants like Nike, Gap, etc.) –> While Tmall is frequently compared to Amazon.com, it’s business model is totally different.

China 159

China Revenue Flash Affiliate 159

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 13, 2011

Clearly define the customer, channel, and revenue model associated with this solution. Explain the business model. In this section, you need to be passionate about revenue, profit, and volume growth. Project both revenues and expense totals for next five years, and past three years, if relevant.

Business Plan 290

Business Plan Sweat Equity Exit Strategy Intellectual Property 290

Tim Keane

MARCH 9, 2011

If, on the other hand, there is some near term prospect of cash flow (say within six months or a year) but no ability to repay in the meantime, then the entrepreneur may try and find a way to finance his “pre-revenue period” using friends and family money that accepts a somewhat lower payment in recognition of a relationship beyond just investing.

Finance 83

Finance Bootstrapping Startup Equity 83

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Paring down products, target customers, business models etc takes courage, but it must be done to have any chance of success. Eric, As you touch on, the lean venture has been the basic model employed by entrepreneurs throughout history until the past 12 years or so when venturing became institutionalized.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

View from Seed

APRIL 23, 2015

Their business models are, in many cases, focused on outlier exits within the portfolio. Additionally, if you’re talking to VCs, it’s implied that you’re thinking big and thinking about a large acquisition or IPO, as well as generating hundreds of millions in revenue. You can find those here. ).

Founder 120

Founder Distribution Viral Seed Stage 120

www.tangosource.com

MARCH 8, 2012

re providing business skills for the startup, back it up with action. Take steps towards product market fit, such as getting signed Letters of Intent (LOIs) which show that your product will have revenue on day 1. You could also create a business model canvas , and collect real world data for each section of the canvas.

Cofounder 48

Cofounder Founder SEO LLC 48

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.

Startup 120

Startup Lean Venture Capital Advisory Board 120

Gust

AUGUST 5, 2012

Clearly define the customer, channel, and revenue model associated with this solution. Explain the business model. In this section, you need to be passionate about revenue, profit, and volume growth. Project both revenues and expense totals for next five years, and past three years, if relevant.

Business Plan 182

Business Plan Sweat Equity Exit Strategy Intellectual Property 182

Cracking the Code

OCTOBER 10, 2008

Save Asia for post-IPO Single instance, multi-tenant, single datacenter - Have only one version of the code in production. Be prepared to cross the desert - SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up front for a multi-year stream of revenue, so it demands enough investment capital to fund 4+ years of runway. Great list!

Software Review 48

Software Review North America Europe Metrics 48

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.

Term Sheet 68

Term Sheet Valuation Dividend Liquidation Preference 68

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 22, 2010

Clearly define the customer, channel, and revenue model associated with this solution. Explain the business model. In this section, you need to be passionate about revenue, profit, and volume growth. Project both revenues and expense totals for next five years, and past three years, if relevant.

Business Plan 186

Business Plan Exit Strategy Sweat Equity Intellectual Property 186

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.

Mobile 160

Mobile Advertising Bandwidth Web 160

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! Feedburner Network. Paperblog network.

Software Review 48

Software Review Software Technical Review Cloud 48

abovethecrowd.com

APRIL 17, 2013

With each hand, a small percentage of the pot is scraped off by the dealer, which in essence becomes the “revenue” for the casino. While casinos use the term “rake,” a plethora of interesting word choices exist which all describe the same thing – keeping a little bit of the revenue for the company that is running the service.

Europe 101

Europe Social Network Technical Review IPO 101

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.

Silicon Valley 105

Silicon Valley Columbus Ohio Incubator 105

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

The movie, “The Social Network” might have had more of an impact on creating future entrepreneurs than any other event of the past 5 years. IPO markets had burned an entire cycle of retail stock investors and many institutional investors to boot. Businesses are also one-click from advertising through Google and now Facebook.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

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. Freemium has a lot of advantage longer term, especially if your product has a network effect.

Product 78

Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

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.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley San Francisco San Jose Startup 185

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.

Equity 40

Equity Silicon Valley Cofounder PR 40

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. Networking. Need a business mentor?

Entrepreneur 60

Entrepreneur Small Business Administration SBA Pennsylvania 60