Remove Customer Development Remove Early Stage Remove Hiring Remove Metrics
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Launching a Portfolio Acceleration Platform at a Venture Capital or Private Equity Fund

David Teten

For instance, tracking ‘months-of-runway’ combined with the month-over-month change to that metric allows us to rapidly identify companies that may be distressed. For example, I suggest it doesn’t make a lot of sense to hire a full-time team member who’s an SEO consultant. Customer Development. Is the service scaleable?

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Create Structure out of the Gate and You’ll Thank Yourself Later

Feld Thoughts

Following is his advice to early stage entrepreneurs for creating structure in their company. So, I’ll explain my reasoning through the story of ASC, a fictitious company that has a combination of characteristics I’ve seen across a number of early stage companies. Soundbites from potential customers are encouraging.

Burn Rate 152
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How Private Equity and Venture Capital Investors Are Eating Their Own Dogfood

David Teten

An investor had few hard metrics other than the actual financials, and little technology to make the process scaleable. Over the past few decades, better metrics became available, and investors could take a more analytical, data-driven approach. ” Historically, investing was a manual, artisan process.

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The Lean Analytics Cycle: Metrics > Hypothesis > Experiment > Act

Occam's Razor

To win in business you need to follow this process: Metrics > Hypothesis > Experiment > Act. We are far too enamored with data collection and reporting the standard metrics we love because others love them because someone else said they were nice so many years ago. That metric is tied to a KPI.

Metrics 156
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Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? But all things are never equal.

Customer 167
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Building a new startup hub

Startup Lessons Learned

The companies I spoke to all agreed that the community there was extremely supportive, especially in the critical ulta-early-stage. Then, create an encouraging environment for early-stage companies. Provide early seed capital, and be the ones to make those introductions. And do your customer development.

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Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. What is customer development?