Campus Entrepreneurship

DECEMBER 23, 2010

Booth has announced a course called Building Interet Strartups: Risk, Reward, and Failure and it is being taught by two of Groupon’s co-founders. Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, the Chicago-based cofounders of the social coupon website, Groupon, turned down an offer from Google in early December.

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Cofounder Chicago Founder IPO 61

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

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2013

For starters let me use “CEO” as a proxy to include her “inner circle” which might mean co-founders or might just mean senior execs of the business. The Mind of the Founder. A cautious person wouldn’t try to pry people out of Twitter right before their IPO to” join my cause!!”

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Startup Dilution San Diego Stock Options 417

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2010

This episode of This Week in Venture Capital featured Michael Montgomery, president of Montgomery & Co. If you don’t know Montgomery & Co it is one of the premier technology & media focused investment banks in the country (and as Michael corrected me they also have a strong Healthcare / Med tech practice).

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IPO Venture Capital Private Placement Cofounder 242

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

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

Scalable Startup

DECEMBER 14, 2012

When you’re the CEO of a startup, a real startup with product and some cash in the bank and/or revenue, there are 3 FULL TIME JOBS. Raising Money – you are constantly doing this, preparing for this and thinking about this, whether it’s pre-seed, seed funding, debt, revenue, partnerships, IPO or other.

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View from Seed

JANUARY 24, 2018

The concept our Guilds is simple: We want to bring together small groups of Product and Go-to-Market experts to lend their time to support our portfolio company founders and key operators. Pierre Valade, Co-Founder of Sunrise & Mobile Designer at Microsoft. Brian Balfour, Founder & CEO of Reforge. Product Guild.

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Operations Cofounder Technical Review Angel Investor 176

Agile VC

JUNE 17, 2015

My first startup job was as an early employee at PayPal, where I took a job at the end of ‘1999 and started a few months later in 2000. We were a profitable company at that point with nearly $200M annualized revenue, one of the first tech companies to IPO after the dot-com bubble.

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Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 188

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief. Most people cant sustain more than a few of these iterations, and the founders rarely get to be involved in the later tries. In order to do this, we have our customer development team work hard to find a market, any market, for the product as currently specified.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 25, 2018

My first day at Bazaarvoice was just a few weeks later, on May 2, 2005, and we built a company from inception to IPO on around $12m of capital use (out of the $24m we raised) in 7 years, creating over a thousand jobs and impacting clients all over the world?—?starting Still in business today and run by my co-founder.

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Bootstrapping Austin Equity Cofounder 48

www.mint.com

MARCH 9, 2010

If the answer to the question centers around “We will achieve revenue soon so our net will improve and give us more runway,” it means the company is in trouble because no product ever ships on time nor achieves the company’s “conservative forecast.” These days revenue is the best source of capital. Who is on your board of directors?

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Software Review Startup Post-Money Valuation Technical Review 68

View from Seed

JUNE 17, 2015

My first startup job was as an early employee at PayPal, where I took a job at the end of ‘1999 and started a few months later in 2000. We were a profitable company at that point with nearly $200M annualized revenue, one of the first tech companies to IPO after the dot-com bubble.

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Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

Over breakfast he got me up to date on his life since school (two non-CEO roles in startups,) but he wanted to talk about his third startup – the one he and two co-founders had started. We’re at 70 people, and we’ll do $40 million in revenue this year and should get to cash flow breakeven this quarter. ”

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Startup Lean Venture Capital Advisory Board 120

infochachkie.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

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. If a consultant claims they can enhance your marketing efforts, pay them based on their direct impact on your incremental sales.

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Equity Silicon Valley Cofounder Technical Review 40

Haystack

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

Khosla Ventures has quietly been on a roll over the past few years, most recently with Square (a monster, monster return, assuming they held post-IPO) and Guardant, among others; and they old early shares in Instacart, DoorDash, OpenDoor, and many winners in the most recent unicorn crop.

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Acquisition Artificial Inteligence Balance Sheet Cofounder 62

Agile VC

JUNE 17, 2015

My first startup job was as an early employee at PayPal, where I took a job at the end of ‘1999 and started a few months later in 2000. We were a profitable company at that point with nearly $200M annualized revenue, one of the first tech companies to IPO after the dot-com bubble.

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Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 100

Rob Go

APRIL 13, 2015

We ended the trek chatting with Paul English, the co-founder of Kayak at his venture foundry Blade. When Kayak went public, the company had one of the highest revenue/employee ratios of any business. Lending Club: IPO Market Cap: $8.4B, Revenue: $98M (2013), Employees: 628 (2014), Rev / Employee: $156K.

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Technology IPO Boston Cofounder 28

Spencer Fry

DECEMBER 7, 2011

One day you're on the top of the world — you've hired the person you dreamed about, you received your first term sheet, you pocketed your first revenue, etc. — You haven't made it until you've been acquired or IPO. You NEED a Co-Founder to Offload Stress. When you're a founder, everything is on your shoulders.

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Cofounder Startup Term Sheet IPO 78

Gust

NOVEMBER 4, 2011

This discussion expands on my Quora answer to a specific question: “ Why were the stock options of MySpace employees worthless even though the company was sold to News Corporation for hundreds of millions? ” The complete story includes a startup-within-a-startup, investments and exits by two VC firms, and some genuine corporate drama.

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Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Merger Vesting 98

Growthink Blog

JULY 2, 2010

That’s a lot of money, particularly considering that Vringo only generated $20,000 in revenues last year. Which is particularly surprising since Vringo’s CEO and co-founder, Jon Medved, was formerly a venture capitalist himself. What’s most interesting is how Vringo raised the money. MILLION in estimated offering fees.

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Venture Capital Stock Options New York Angel Investor 85

Reid Hoffman

JANUARY 20, 2013

20 years ago, the classic startup model was to have young founders start a breakthrough company, then bring in “grey hair” in the form of experienced executives once it was time to scale the business. In other words, Ben asserts that bringing in a professional CEO should be a last resort for a founder. During the dot com era, Yahoo!’s

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Founder Hiring Cofounder Hawaii 78

David Teten

AUGUST 20, 2019

I’ve been a traditional equity VC for 8 years, and I’m now researching Revenue-Based Investing and other new approaches to VC. The question I’m asking myself: should a new VC fund use Revenue-Based Investing, traditional equity VC, or possibly both (likely from two separate pools of capital)? Greater transparency to limited partners.

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Revenue SBIC Cofounder Venture Capital 60

readwrite.com

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

And nobody is loving this more than Aaron Levie, the 27-year-old co-founder and CEO of Box, which sells cloud-based data storage and collaboration software to enterprises. Levie won’t disclose revenue figures, but allows that Box has 650 employees, roughly double the level from a year ago. The Next Market Will Be Bigger.

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Silicon Valley Architecture San Francisco Cloud 64

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. Over-communicate with employees, investors, customers. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. Offer equity instead of cash.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

ConversionXL

AUGUST 13, 2019

It’s common for companies to put a revenue figure on what it means to be successful in SaaS. But only 400 software companies have made it to the $500M revenue mark. Here are seven insights on SaaS metrics from successful founders and consultants. . Ahrefs decided to track only monthly revenue growth for their product.

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Metrics SQL Retention Churn Rate 117

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. At HP the founders were still at the company and still running the business. (I’ll show you the memo in a second. But first some background.)

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Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 182

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

If a company has reached a level of success, has been around for a few years and you believe the company has potential to break out into a much bigger company then you should let the founders take money off of the table. Founders however are asked to take low salaries and never really get back the time they worked for free.

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Founder Liquidation Preference Term Sheet Participating Preferred 329

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 3, 2012

With over $1 billion in revenue, 2000 employees and a market capitalization of over $6 billion, Akamai has become a role model for scalable start-ups. billion in revenue, over $1 billion in gross profit and $500 million in EBITDA. The first year of revenue (1999) was $4 million – a remarkable achievement. Gross Profit. $(60).

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Distribution Lean Massachusetts Cofounder 49

Seeing Both Sides

APRIL 1, 2013

As my classmates were rushing off to high-paying, high-powered jobs on Wall Street, I joined a Series A start-up with 30 employees as a product manager, making $65,000 per year - lower than my pre-MBA salary at management consultancy The Boston Consulting Group. Your co-workers in one start-up become your co-founders in another.

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Boston B2C Salary Cofounder 52

Scalable Startup

SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

San Francisco, over 50 universities and trillions of dollars in revenue. VCs of course, Angels, they invented the term Super Angel, San Francisco, Real Estate leverage, IPO millionaires, corporate funding, Asian and European money, and on and on. So what if a few totally unqualified employees that snuck in make a few million.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Angel Investor Hawaii 22

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

we had no revenue. As a result, we knew that our pitch would need to steer into investors’ biggest concern: the lack of revenue. Instead, our strategy was to steer immediately into the revenue question because that was the top concern of investors in 2004. We made the mistake of listing three different revenue streams.

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Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

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. Almost all of them got scooped up by pre-IPO Google this time. That year, right before the IPO, those months mattered a great deal in terms of financial outcomes.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

www.paulgraham.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

And since a startup thatsucceeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies gettingrich is doable too. A lot ofwould-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is theinitial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute.Venture capitalists know better. Ideally you want between two and four founders.

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Startup Cofounder Software Stock 105

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

In some Unicorns, the company was co-founded by Israelis but the centre of operation is US (like in the case of Coursera), so curators have to apply their own judgement on whether the startup is considered Israeli or not. More than 17 Israeli unicorns graduated so far in 2021. Israeli unicorns have evolved in recent years.

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Lock-up Period Merger IPO 218

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2020

I've known Brian Chesky, Co-Founder, CEO and Head of Community at Airbnb for a long time. He also has strongly held ideas about structuring a company to institutionalize these intentions to make sure the next leader, future employees, and the next board will be true to that philosophy. 6,000, 7,000 employees.

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Silicon Valley Hosting Cofounder Employee 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

For example, I often cite a real example of a problem that has as its root cause a new employee who was not properly trained. I pick that example on purpose, for two reasons: 1) most of the companies I work with deal with this problem and yet 2) almost none of them have any kind of training program in place for new employees.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164