Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? Yet for every founder there are 10-20 other employees who take the near-equivalent risks in joining an early-stage company. Can you recognize and capitalize on them? Tenacious – can you keep going when everyone else gives up?

Cofounder 227

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 227

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2019

First, the introduction of seed money as an institutional form of capital. Before the mid-2000s, we mostly had individual angels writing small checks from their personal capital, but over the last 10-15 years we’ve seen hundreds of new institutional seed funds formed. No need to name names.

Lean 108

Lean Venture Capital Conversion IPO 108

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 2, 2011

A lot of my time is spent helping early-stage companies get to proof points so that they can raise capital. They might have some seed money and are thinking or raising a Series A based on success of an early release (MVP). Bill Payne is an expert on how early-stage investors should look at valuation.

Valuation 198

Valuation Revenue Pre-Money Valuation Early Stage 198

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 23, 2018

Accelerators are mainly focused on helping companies achieve business growth in a short period of time, typically a few months, hence the term “accelerator” They support young companies by providing mentorship and seed money. It lasts longer than an accelerator, usually 6 months to a year.

Incubator 127

Incubator South America San Francisco Chile 127

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2013

For the past 5 years or so Google, Facebook and a handful of tech industry giants have been quietly buying scores of early-stage startups for their talent. Many buying companies price these deals on the basis of $1 million per engineer on the team for an early-stage deal. Let’s assume $2 million in seed money.

Liquidation Preference 357

Liquidation Preference Early Stage Retention Lock-up Period 357

ReadWriteStart

SEPTEMBER 17, 2021

The world of startups is a bit like a gold rush right now: there’s lots of money to be made, almost no rules regarding who will make or lose it, and only a few will actually see a sustained profit at the end of the day. The world is so saturated with seed money right now that it’s easy to lose sight of what running a business is all about.

Startup 130

Startup Revenue Cofounder Angel Investor 130

ReadWriteStart

SEPTEMBER 17, 2021

The world of startups is a bit like a gold rush right now: there’s lots of money to be made, almost no rules regarding who will make or lose it, and only a few will actually see a sustained profit at the end of the day. The world is so saturated with seed money right now that it’s easy to lose sight of what running a business is all about.

Startup 78

Startup Revenue Cofounder Angel Investor 78

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014

With the influx of seed money, much has been written about the fact that start-ups that are taking far more funding than they need. Being swamped with funding is a problem that most early stage companies would love to have. Here are four key drawbacks: Pitfall 1: Solving every problem with non-scalable hacks.

Guerilla 158

Guerilla Seed Money Vertical Early Stage 158

This is going to be BIG.

APRIL 16, 2018

First, in the early stages, there's a lot more information that can be gleaned about you than we can know for sure about the success of your company. You think you're getting this big fat check compared to the seed money you raised, but they're actually doing something more like dipping their toes in the water.

Due Diligence 96

Due Diligence Early Stage Term Sheet Vesting 96

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 3, 2010

Chris Dixon provided some commentary on Twitter that he believes I missed “the most important point about fund size.&# He’s specifically referring to his point of view that entrepreneurs shouldn’t take seed money from “big VC’s&# (he defines them as > $100 million). Let me give you an example.

Venture Capital 265

Venture Capital Term Sheet Early Stage Silicon Valley 265

Feld Thoughts

JULY 14, 2015

A company raises $1m of seed money from angels in a convertible note with a $6m cap. Assuming equity is raised at or above that cap, the total dilution, before the new money, is 16.6% (equivalent to an equity financing of $1m at a $6m post money valuation. ” They are running out of money.

Recapitalization 70

Recapitalization Pre-Money Valuation Post-Money Valuation Angel Investor 70

Kodorra

NOVEMBER 6, 2018

Accelerators are mainly focused on helping companies achieve business growth in a short period of time, typically a few months, hence the term “accelerator” They support young companies by providing mentorship and seed money. It lasts longer than an accelerator, usually 6 months to a year.

Incubator 40

Incubator Programming San Francisco Chile 40

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014

With the influx of seed money, much has been written about the fact that start-ups that are taking far more funding than they need. Being swamped with funding is a problem that most early stage companies would love to have. Here are four key drawbacks: Pitfall 1: Solving every problem with non-scalable hacks.

Guerilla 90

Guerilla Seed Money Vertical Early Stage 90

www.businessinsider.com

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

Enter you email address and zip code to set up customized email alerts. Top Startup Advisor Paul Graham Just Warned Against Taking Googles Money. Google Ventures has made more than 100 seed investments, Maris said, including some past and present Y Combinator companies, and is making one to two new ones a week. Document Center.

Silicon Valley 54

Silicon Valley Startup Valuation Venture Capital 54

cdixon.org

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

Great points, though your bio does read “Personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including … a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode!” The idea has value, but the implementation and design model you follow (customer feedback loop) is where the traction will come from.

Stealth 68

Stealth Startup NDA Cofounder 68

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 10, 2017

Convertible notes/SAFEs are usually executed around times of maximal uncertainty for a company; the very early stages. However, there are circumstances in which founders know there are potential serious milestones on the short-term horizon that would dramatically influence valuation, but they need to close their seed money now.

Valuation 48

Valuation Dilution Silicon Valley Seed Stage 48

pandodaily.com

NOVEMBER 29, 2012

But wherever you stand on that, there’s one very real consequence of this explosion in seed funding: There has not been a corresponding explosion in investors willing to lead the next round, the so-called Series A. This time around, there has been an explosion at the early stages, and the very late pre-IPO growth stages.

Technical Review 93

Technical Review Silicon Valley Incubator Syria 93

Berkonomics

MARCH 30, 2012

There is still abundant money available for early stage investment, but many of the rules have changed, as well as the processes for accessing these resources. The great majority of investors who did invest in “idea stage” businesses, lost fortunes when the Internet “bubble” burst at the beginning of the last decade.

Intellectual Property 76

Intellectual Property Entrepreneur Small Business Administration SBA 76

www.paulgraham.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start withgood people, to make something customers actually want, and to spendas little money as possible. The woman in charge of sales was so tenacious that I used to feelsorry for potential customers on the phone with her. Paul Erdos wasparticularly good at this.

Startup 105

Startup Cofounder Software Stock 105

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2009

.&# And I think this line of thinking has started to become conventional wisdom as outlined in Chris Dixon’s excellent blog post saying that you need to be careful raising seed money from a large VC fund. I do think you need to be careful with funds that have done 20-30 seeds deals in fairly rapid succession.

Software Review 283

Software Review Term Sheet Due Diligence Southern California 283

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

On a panel that I sat on with Ron in LA in 2008 he stated that there were no circumstances in which the founder should take money off of the table. A friend of mine is a serial entrepreneur and is running a high-profile, early stage company in NorCal. I raised $500k in seed money to start the company.

Founder 329

Founder Liquidation Preference Term Sheet Participating Preferred 329

Rob Go

NOVEMBER 15, 2016

For most companies, this means top-line revenue, but in some cases it’s more about numbers of active users or number of customers. You might do unscalable, hacky things to get customers. The early stage of a business is when everything is a blank canvas and you have maximum agility.

Product 28

Product Seed Stage Seed Money Metrics 28

Rob Go

MARCH 20, 2013

The best trick I’ve heard (which is actually really hard to do) is to talk to customers, but to do it from the perspective of a skeptic. Is it possible to take seed money and not go for the Series A, etc, and just earn revenue? Be brutally honest with yourself.

Bootstrapping 46

Bootstrapping Finance Dividend Vesting 46

www.paulgraham.com

APRIL 28, 2010

It wasnt because they werent accredited investors that I didntask my parents for seed money, though. When we were starting Viaweb,I didnt know about the concept of an accredited investor, anddidnt stop to think about the value of investors connections.The reason I didnt take money from my parents was that I didntwant them to lose it.

Technical Review 76

Technical Review Startup Software Review Angel Investor 76

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. Startups that are aiming to enterprises would do right raising VC to improve their network and therefore have a greater chance to get customers. All what you said is so true.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84