Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2011

Blogs weren’t popularized yet so it was an oddity for me to read the founder of a software company spewing out advice. Free email providers (like gmail or hotmail) didn’t exist, and you had to pay a separate fee to dial up companies like AOL to access the internet. But I loved reading them and so did my team. 29:45 minutes.

Software Review 285

Software Review Software St. Louis API 285

Agile VC

MAY 26, 2011

Many assume it was a cakewalk, based on the success LinkedIn has enjoyed over time and the current stature of our founder/CEO Reid Hoffman (now Chairman). Google is still a private company (their IPO was Aug 2004). Google is still a private company (their IPO was Aug 2004). link] leehower.

Term Sheet 178

Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

Duct Tape Marketing

JANUARY 19, 2023

Despite not going to university, Ash became a serial tech founder and the first marketing director of a unicorn startup – Just Eat). I I of course, it's so cliche now, but you know, I like to tell even 30 year olds, you know, about uh, dial up, um, internet and, uh, Yeah. Well, you're gonna judge it by the team, by the co-founders.

Audio 87

Audio Cofounder Framework Early Stage 87

VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 15, 2017

Orcam was created by the founders of Mobileye (NYSE: MBLY and one of Israel’s largest IPOs ), Prof. Co-founders Ami Daniel and Matan Peled both served as naval officers. Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram (great interview with them here ). This interview with Ami sheds more light on the company.

Artificial Inteligence 122

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Startup 122

Agile VC

JUNE 5, 2011

So Groupon obviously filed their S-1 the other day to formally being the IPO process. Even for those who don’t care to dive into the numbers, it’s worth a quick glance because co-founder/CEO Andrew Mason wrote a letter which forms the preamble of the full document. Financial Snapshot: 2010 Revenue: $713M.

North America 100

North America Chicago Boston Silicon Valley 100

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

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

This slinging of whatever against the wall to see what sticks does not a market make, is to me a sign of too much capital in the wrong hands, and it's already the most over invested area in recent years- in both human and financial capital- particularly relative to revenue. Otherwise it's a great idea.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

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.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Campus Entrepreneurship

DECEMBER 23, 2010

but I don’t recall courses on internet strategy. 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. He’s started four IPO-able companies in eight years. That is a great opportunity for Booth students.

Cofounder 61

Cofounder Chicago Founder IPO 61

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

the consumer internet landscape in 2004 vs. today. In 2004, the consumer internet was just beginning to rebound. we had no revenue. In 2004, investors regained interest in the consumer internet again. As a result, we knew that our pitch would need to steer into investors’ biggest concern: the lack of revenue.

Entrepreneur 111

Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 24, 2019

I discuss category creation with one of the co-authors of Play Bigger , Christopher Lochhead, in episode #232 of Legends and Losers if you would like to really delve into that (it is a very important topic). Sure, there are many other events, including eTail and Internet Retailer. But Shop.org is where you go to learn and network.

Software Review 48

Software Review Sales Cofounder Analytics 48

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

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).

IPO 242

IPO Venture Capital Private Placement Cofounder 242

VC Cafe

MARCH 28, 2011

We rarely hear of such a large round amongst Internet startups in Israel, which is why Wix’s founding round is particularly interesting. Today, Wix’s revenue is estimated at a few dozen million USD and the company has 9 million registered users, who developed 8.5 Potentially an IPO in 2012. million sites.

Flash 142

Flash IPO HTML 142

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. Consider Daniel Dreymann, a founder of Goodmail Systems Inc., Less than 1% are currently in IPO registration.

Venture Capital 107

Venture Capital Software Review Rhode Island North Dakota 107

pandodaily.com

NOVEMBER 29, 2012

Meanwhile, the rash of early liquidity and recent IPOs — unsatisfying as they were — gave liquidity to thousands of employees at large companies, and a subset of those made very real money. This time around, there has been an explosion at the early stages, and the very late pre-IPO growth stages. Now it’s glutted.

Technical Review 93

Technical Review Silicon Valley Incubator Syria 93

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. Amazon saw that the internet would change retail.

Cofounder 28

Cofounder Business Model IPO Non-Compete 28

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.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Today, many of these businesses are suffering because the ecosystem no longer balances thanks to the Internet. Here’s Andrew Chen’s description : “it strikes me that consumer internet companies often don’t care much whether or not they have viable businesses in the short run. Sorry about that.)

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets. They are on-schedule and on-budget, but their gross metrics are way off. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 10, 2013

Yesterday I read No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet. Akamai was an amazing pre-Internet bubble story. From nothing to IPO in less than 18 months, a market cap of > $20 billion, followed by a 99% decline in the stock price post-bubble.

Denver 129

Denver IPO Cofounder 129

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis. I am chugging along.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Haystack

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

Internet security has always been a favorite of technology VCs, but I personally suspect the idea of security will broaden as the Internet itself grows beyond phones, tablets, and other connected devices — as we see now in the news with our social graphs, artificial intelligence, crypto, and other emergent technologies.

Acquisition 62

Acquisition Artificial Inteligence Balance Sheet Cofounder 62

www.huffingtonpost.com

MAY 10, 2011

Because we achieved our most aggressive revenue targets and built a strong community, we realized that we had a broader opportunity to change the world of graphic design. I was lucky to sign on as advisor and investor the founder of a very high-profile consumer Internet site who happens to also be a former engineer, who I will call Richard.

CTO 43

CTO CTO Hire PHP Cofounder 43

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. The first version of the 3D IMVU client took about six months to build, and as the founders iterated towards a compelling user experience, the user base grew monthly thereafter. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 4, 2008

Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. 2007 was a turning point for the SaaS industry with the successful IPOs of NetSuite, SuccessFactors, DemandTec, Salary.com, Aprimo and Constant Contact. or What do I need to do to get ready for an IPO.

Software Review 48

Software Review South Korea IPO Portfolio 48

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. Some companies and founders refuse to serve existing customers, and are always lurching from one great idea to the next.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. Naturally, they had just raised money, and their new investors were understandably pissed.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

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). The key is to be able to refute as many major hypotheses as you can.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2020

I've known Brian Chesky, Co-Founder, CEO and Head of Community at Airbnb for a long time. This was supposed to be Airbnb's biggest year by many measures, including its IPO, which was one of the most anticipated since the 2008 financial crisis. Brian Chesky : I am Brian Chesky, co-founder, CEO, and head of community at Airbnb.

Silicon Valley 60

Silicon Valley Hosting Cofounder Employee 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. Small batches also help deliver value earlier in the project. February 25, 2009 8:12 PM Anonymoussaid. Small is beautiful.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

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?

Software Review 68

Software Review Startup Post-Money Valuation Technical Review 68

Reid Hoffman

JUNE 8, 2021

While many travel industry leaders chose to “go dark,” as Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky put it , while they decided how to navigate next steps, Chesky took a different approach: He got candid. Today, we are thrilled to have Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky with us.

Silicon Valley 69

Silicon Valley Hosting Rhode Island Design 69

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

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

As a consumer internet company with millions of customers, it may seem to have little relevancy for an enterprise software company with only a handful of potential customers, or a computer security company whose customers demand a rigorous audit before accepting a new release. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167