ReadWriteStart

JULY 18, 2011

Kedrosky: "In the 90's I was an analyst through all this [tech investment and IPO] madness. You want to build your own IPO and exit. Every company has a forecast for how it will get to an arbitrary $100 million in revenue and they all hit it on year five. For 10 years there have been no gazelles to take down.

Investment Bankers 153

Investment Bankers Technical Review Cofounder Due Diligence 153

Version One Ventures

FEBRUARY 6, 2019

To make investments attractive, biotech founders also sell that the time to exit might be faster than in IT (it is true that successful therapeutics companies IPO or are acquired before launch) and that now, they can accelerate drug discovery with AI/machine learning (meaning, less time and thereby less capital is required).

Dilution 132

Dilution Artificial Inteligence IPO Valuation 132

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

Three reasons: There is a relative valuation between the price a VC pays and their expectations of what it will exit for in an IPO or trade sale. Huge downturns have a real impact on the revenue line of start-ups and therefore the pressure on valuations. I argued for literally a year to slash burn.

Burn Rate 263

Burn Rate Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Private Equity 263

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2013

A cautious person wouldn’t try to pry people out of Twitter right before their IPO to” join my cause!!” Sure, our revenue is growing, but is that enough to raise an internal round? Dilution / valuation. I wasn’t expecting this much dilution this quickly.” “We. .” ” Yes.

Startup 417

Startup Dilution San Diego Stock Options 417

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2019

We slept under the tables, and pulled all-nighters to get to first customer ship, man the booths at trade shows or ship products to make quarterly revenue – all because it was “our” company. Startup Compensation Changes with Growth Capital – 12 Years to an IPO. Much has changed about the economics of startups in the two decades.

Stock Options 333

Stock Options Stock Vesting Common Stock 333

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 18, 2014

Revenue multiple? And now I have to explain to team that they’re taking more dilution than they expected if we do a down round. Me: More dilution? Maybe an IPO – who knows? How will you price the next round? Your A round? Him: On metrics. We’ll have some proof points by then. What proof points?

Venture Capital 417

Venture Capital Liquidation Preference Valuation Term Sheet 417

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. times the investment.).

Term Sheet 68

Term Sheet Valuation Dividend Liquidation Preference 68

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 Below is a post I wrote on their Yahoo! Groups list on March 15, 2005.

Bootstrapping 48

Bootstrapping Austin Equity Cofounder 48

Gust

MAY 24, 2012

Dual-class voting structures are receiving a lot of attention these days along with intense publicity related to the Facebook IPO , following in the wake of other recent tech IPOs with a similar structure such as Zynga and LinkedIn.

IPO 159

IPO Equity Common Stock Stock 159

K9 Ventures

OCTOBER 10, 2017

Seed is the new Series A. (~$2M used get for building product, establishing product-market fit and early revenue). 6M-$15M used to scale customer acquisition and revenue). So the amount of dilution a company will take on still remains the same over the life of the company. Series A is the new Series B. (~6M-$15M

Seed Stage 82

Seed Stage Finance Later Stage Equity 82

Ben's Blog

AUGUST 17, 2020

OH in South Park, San Francisco (or on Zoom from Big Sky, Montana): “OMG, crazy – that firm just paid 100x revenue to invest in [insert hot startup here] – what could they be thinking?” Multiples are not only used to value companies today but also to value companies several years down the line.

Valuation 36

Valuation Balance Sheet Cofounder Forecast 36

Gust

SEPTEMBER 17, 2014

Revenue multiple? And now I have to explain to team that they’re taking more dilution than they expected if we do a down round. Me: More dilution? Maybe an IPO – who knows? How will you price the next round? Your A round? Him: On metrics. We’ll have some proof points by then. What proof points? EBITDA multiple?

Liquidation Preference 153

Liquidation Preference Valuation Term Sheet Stock 153

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And as everyone’s attention starts to focus on those same indicators, their value is being diluted. We’ve learned that data can be used as a reality-check against vision without diluting the mission or reverting to “sum of all features&# focus groups. What is the right revenue model?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

I thing I’ve learned over the years is that technology purists hate advertising even when it is that revenue stream that truthfully drives much of our industry. In 1995 Netscape IPO’d and browsers started to become more prevalent. Too many entrepreneurs focus on dilution. That gave Google a huge cost advantage.

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

There are a whole range of valid reasons why non-developers would want to dictate the production release schedule (Seasonal/timing issues, marketing, fulfillment concerns, documentation/training, revenue controls, legal/regulatory. " Actually this process works really well in a financial company.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

abovethecrowd.com

APRIL 20, 2016

The pressures of lofty paper valuations, massive burn rates (and the subsequent need for more cash), and unprecedented low levels of IPOs and M&A, have created a complex and unique circumstance which many Unicorn CEOs and investors are ill-prepared to navigate. In Q1 of 2016 there were zero VC-backed technology IPOs.

IPO 40

IPO Term Sheet Silicon Valley Valuation 40

YoungUpstarts

MAY 31, 2016

The single biggest reason that the average company struggles or even fails is due to their lack of focus and dilution of their greatest resource, which are people. Yes, cash flow is king and every start-up wants to achieve greatness or hit a sizable IPO, initial public offering sooner than later. Is a marketing plan important?

Technical Review 100

Technical Review Leadership Early Stage Initial Public Offering 100

Pascal's View

JANUARY 28, 2010

Many venture capitalists and other capital markets experts believe that 2010 will be a better year for achieving IPO liquidity because a number of well established companies that remain private have reached sufficient scale to attract much-needed public equity funding. This relationship is often absent among later-round venture investors.

Management 53

Management Silicon Valley Virginia Seattle 53

www.paulgraham.com

APRIL 28, 2010

In an IPO, it might not merely addexpense, but change the outcome. Those remedial actions can delay, stall or even kill the IPO. Of course the odds of any given startup doing an IPO are small.But not as small as they might seem. There never has to be atime when you have no revenues. Hell if they know.In

Technical Review 76

Technical Review Startup Software Review Angel Investor 76

Professor VC

JUNE 20, 2011

But of course, the model had us requiring only $10M equity to breakeven and to achieve $185M in revenues in 2008 (the magic Year 5 in all business plans). So what does this all mean. As I said up front, I have mixed emotions about the financing. Is $120M enough capital to reach these exit goals?

San Jose 28

San Jose Angel Investor Term Sheet Venture Capital 28

www.paulgraham.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

They get the same kind of stock and get diluted the same amount in futurerounds. So the deals take longer, dilute you more, and imposemore onerous conditions. In those days you could go public as adogfood portal, so as a company with a real product and real revenues,we might have done well. This money isnt revenue.

Startup 105

Startup Cofounder Software Stock 105

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2016

Many had started IPO’ing and we started to think about our future. Invoca was raising at the tail end of this market phenomenon at this time doing tens of millions in SaaS recurring revenue and growing at a nice clip. CMRR (contracted monthly recurring revenue) grow 100% y/y. forward sales with some as high as 12x sales.

Balance Sheet 150

Balance Sheet Burn Rate Valuation Forecast 150

discuss.joelonsoftware.com

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

. * I dont control the companys valuation: if for example the company is privately-held, then the value of equity might be complicated and outside my control (you can dilute equity, reinvest any revenue instead of paying it in dividends, etc., Unethical IMO but some people make money that way.

Sweat Equity 40

Sweat Equity Equity Angel Investor Affiliate 40

Reid Hoffman

JUNE 8, 2021

Airbnb was preparing for an IPO right when the pandemic hit, and everything changed in a matter of days. But now our hosts are really angry, and they have a huge revenue shortfall. That probably saved a huge amount of dilution, rather than doing a down round at between $15 billion to $18 billion. We couldn’t make them whole.

Silicon Valley 69

Silicon Valley Hosting Rhode Island Design 69

Ben's Blog

MAY 24, 2021

IPO market. There are a number of trends concerning IPOs and capital formation to note: First, the raw number of IPOs has declined significantly: From 1980-2000, the US averaged roughly 300 IPOs per year; from 2001-2016, the average fell to 108 per year. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, SPACs raised $87.9

SEC 36

SEC Accredited Investor IPO Technical Review 36

Reid Hoffman

JUNE 8, 2021

Airbnb was preparing for an IPO right when the pandemic hit, and everything changed in a matter of days. But now our hosts are really angry, and they have a huge revenue shortfall. That probably saved a huge amount of dilution, rather than doing a down round at between $15 billion to $18 billion. We couldn’t make them whole.

Silicon Valley 36

Silicon Valley Hosting Rhode Island Design 36

Seeing Both Sides

JANUARY 13, 2015

My boss and mentor from Open Market, Gary Eichhorn , made the entire management team read it in the 1990s to hammer home its important lessons as we stumbled through the chasm on our way to scaling from zero to nearly $100 million in revenue in a few years. Would an IPO be possible in the future if we can continue growing 50-100% per year?

Mezzanine 20

Mezzanine IPO Finance Business Model 20