Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.

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Hunter Walker

AUGUST 31, 2023

” That was the email one of Ethena’s founders sent to me and Melanie Naranjo on 8/21/21, a bit over two years ago. Hunter Walk: One of my favorite things to do for founders is speaking with people who are considering joining their startup. I know you’ll really enjoy chatting.”

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

When you first start your company and raise initial venture capital your board probably consists of 1-3 founders and 1-2 VCs. Most experienced VCs won’t push you to give up founder control at this stage of the business nor should they. Founder’s perspective. You’ll get empathy. Experience.

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ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 15, 2022

This is especially the case if expecting the agency’s client work to provide the bulk of its revenue during the early stages of operations. The experience of the agency’s initial founders likely dictates early business domains to target. Great procedures go beyond technology and development methodologies.

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View from Seed

OCTOBER 18, 2017

When describing the Everyday Economy, it is helpful to talk about some of the verticals that are seeing wholesale redesign and the opportunities within those verticals. We have blogged about a few of the verticals so far, including housing , food , entertainment , and others.

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ConversionXL

MARCH 17, 2021

Last September (2020), six months after the 1st lockdown, my co-founder Vladimir Blagojevic and I decided to run market research to figure out what challenges B2B companies face and how they solve them. And while this was a good start, a significant position of these companies were early-stage startups. Let’s dive in.

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David Teten

JANUARY 21, 2021

This essay is part of a series on alternative VC: I: Revenue-Based Investing: a new option for founders who care about control. III: Why are Revenue-Based VCs investing in so many women and underrepresented founders? VI: Revenue-based financing: The next step for private equity and early-stage investment.

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YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 7, 2017

Startup founders counting the days until break-even or actively seeking outside capital must focus on streamlining their development cycles. These five strategies are proven to work for early-stage companies in a variety of industries — including, perhaps, yours. They quite literally can’t afford to wait.

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. A Day in the Life of A Founder For those of you who’ve never started a company, let me assure you that it never happens like the pleasant articles you read in business magazines or in case studies.

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VC Cafe

JUNE 30, 2022

I love landscapes as they help organise the categories needed to define the vertical. It forces the founders and investors to understand where the technology can play a pivotal role in shifting control from the big tech companies to the user, and where it needs to improve, such as the negative environmental impact of mining etc.

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Version One Ventures

DECEMBER 3, 2019

We loved the founders, but didn’t have much conviction around the scalability of a browser plug-in and the fact that this was a bridge round. Ryan and his co-founders proved us wrong big time and built one of the largest social media management companies. This was not our early-stage sweet spot and the $100M valuation felt rich.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2021

billion in early funding. Dozens of outreach programs across the military now offer quick revenue to early-stage companies. Anduril founder Palmer Luckey has sardonically noted that the only defense companies to reach unicorn status in the past 30 years have all been founded by billionaires able to endure long gaps in funding.

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VC Cafe

JANUARY 29, 2024

Spoiler alert: I believe that 2024-2025 will be an amazing time to invest in early stage startups. Enterprise adoption of generative AI is still in its early days, but according to Accenture , it is expected to unlock an additional $10.3 trillion in economic value against the baseline by 2038.

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Hunter Walker

SEPTEMBER 27, 2021

VCs With Multiple Stage-Specific Funds Are Likely To Rewrite The Existing Etiquette. And What This Means For Founders. Or they’ll give a portfolio startup a window of exclusivity of a few years before considering more companies in the vertical. How does the expansion of firm mandate change incentives for its individual partners?

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Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

Even when founders don’t get the desired response, they still appreciate our quick turnaround and even forward along referrals. In fact, a recommendation from a founder we passed on is one of our best performing portfolio companies! Invest in mission-driven founders. within 24 to 48 hours (90% of the time).

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Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

So most early-stage VCs have started to evaluate investment opportunities with an imaginary benchmark in mind: can this company become a $100 million opportunity? As the consumer Internet space becomes more and more crowded, every startup founder needs to be thinking about these two ways to scale a business.

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Mucker Lab

OCTOBER 12, 2016

Following the inevitable ups and downs of the VC investment cycle, and what founders can do when it all turns cold. Vertical integration of different funding risks. Financially, they have to reserve capital to support large portfolio companies that account for big portions of the portfolio and thus make less early stage investment.

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David Teten

JANUARY 9, 2018

Many VCs focus on specific verticals, usually based on the sector in which a VC initially made her reputation. That said, one limitation in early-stage investing particularly is that 2022’s growth sectors probably don’t fit neatly into a vertical we can define today. This model certainly makes sense.

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David Teten

JANUARY 9, 2018

Many VCs focus on specific verticals, usually based on the sector in which a VC initially made her reputation. That said, one limitation in early-stage investing particularly is that 2022’s growth sectors probably don’t fit neatly into a vertical we can define today. This model certainly makes sense.

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Venture Capital Private Equity Silicon Valley Differentiation 60

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Tim Friedman, Founder, PE Stack , said, “If I could offer one piece of advice to today’s managers, it would be to take the time to understand the demands of the modern institutional LP. Data companies focused on early-stage startups include Aingel , fundsUP , Preseries , PredictLeads , and Sploda. 3) Raise capital.

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ConversionXL

JANUARY 28, 2021

David Raab Founder at CDP Institute. While early-stage companies may not see an immediate need for using a CDP, setting the groundwork before reaching accelerated growth can save time and frustration down the line. Use cases for CDP’s. Avoid Data Silos. Provide an Omnichannel Customer Experience.

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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

In venture capital in particular, early-stage companies are often operating in frontier industries, where the rules are unpredictable and conventional analytic frameworks may be misleading. Signal is a fundraising tool for founders run by NFX Guild, which identifies the most relevant VCs for you. . Pitchbot.vc

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Austin Startup

MARCH 7, 2018

Brunner (@heatherjbrunner) | Twitter Preston James Co-founder & CEO DivInc Preston is at the center of everything Diversity & Inclusion in Austin. Eugene Sepulveda (@EugeneAustin) | Twitter Ingrid Vandervelt CEO & Founder EBW2020 Ingrid Vanderveldt is the Chairman and CEO of Empowering a Billion Women by 2020 (EBW2020).

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A Crowded Space

AUGUST 12, 2011

By this, I really just mean what I look for in entrepreneurs and companies at early stages. The key is finding that company before they’ve become huge – it tends to happen fast if you’ve really nailed the NPS bit. · Charming founders – I used to think this was superficial. That’s the name of the game.

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VC Cafe

JULY 7, 2023

Most of the companies that raised these mega rounds are relatively early stage in terms of product and monetisation (if at all) and about half of the companies that raised large sums, are developing LLMs, which generally requires deep pockets to cover 1) cloud costs, 2) expensive deep learning engineers 3) get the data to train the models.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. What are Early Stage VC’s Really Asking? Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Just as a refresher.

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Austin Startup

JUNE 22, 2020

Far too often, founders spend inordinate time talking to angels and VCs trying to convince them of their vision, commitment and results. The phrase, “missionaries, not mercenaries,” applies just as equally to early-stage investors as employees. How could a company only six months old have $600k in revenue this month?

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Eric Friedman

MARCH 25, 2019

Consumer tech works best when it’s completely horizontal or deeply vertical. Multi-vertical out of the gate usually fails. Once you nail the first vertical, you can expand to others. To put it another way, doing less better is a much better way to focus. The balance can be difficult to reach.

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View from Seed

AUGUST 13, 2014

So to successfully raise a seed round of capital, founders should possess at least a basic understanding of the different types of angel investors they’ll encounter. It can also help founders better approach angels in the first place. The Domain Angel. The Previous-Colleague Angel. The Financial Angel.

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David Teten

AUGUST 19, 2019

RBI normally requires founders to pay back their investors with a fixed percentage of revenue until they have finished providing the investor with a fixed return on capital, which they agree upon in advance. For background, see Revenue-Based Investing: A New Option for Founders who Care About Control. Decathlon Capital.

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ConversionXL

JANUARY 18, 2022

This is particularly true for complex verticals such as B2B SaaS products, where product marketing’s ability to pinpoint users with the most need and educate them on product features and benefits proves useful. To become and remain competitive, you need both brand marketing and product marketing at each stage of your company’s development.

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VC Cafe

AUGUST 29, 2022

As an investor in early stage startups in gaming and metaverse/web3 at Remagine Ventures , I naturally consume a lot of content on this topic, and this post also helps me digest and separate signal from noise. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO. You can read other highlights of the interview on Techcrunch.

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VC Cafe

DECEMBER 1, 2022

However, in reality the Metaverse is still in its early stages of development, and yet, we already can see positive examples of its impact. As the underlying technology for the Metaverse continues to evolve, we will see more and more use cases brought to life across verticals. Into the Metaverse event in London.

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VC Cafe

APRIL 20, 2022

Six months ago I published a post on VC Cafe titled, the state of creative automation , diving into vertical applications of AI on content creation of all sorts; from text (GPT-3 and the likes) to Synthetic video (powered by companies like HourOne). This list of use cases is just scratching the surface.

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Haystack

JANUARY 12, 2020

As valuations have gone up early, the cost of ownership has also risen, and in an early-stage fund where the loss ratio is likely to be much higher, high ownership has been increasingly important to these funds. 4/ Social Forces – As seed stage funds grow and mature, the GPs grow and mature too.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

It was amazing to see the two founders, Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, build a $100 million company from coffee cups and T-shirts. But Cafepress’s most memorable moment was when the founders used a “Lessons Learned” VC pitch to raise their second round of funding and got an 8-digit term sheet that same afternoon.

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Hunter Walker

MAY 19, 2014

Anecdotally, over the last 3-6 months we’re definitely seeing more examples of larger early stage or multistage funds offer to do 80-100% of a company’s seed round. And it hasn’t been a special situation such as the founder as an EIR at said fund, or having been previously backed by that fund at earlier company.

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