Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

Your goal is that magical breakeven point and hockey-stick profit-growth curve. This could equate to two technical founders (with a minimal salary), funding two developers for a year. Raising money from professional investors, even friends and family, takes time.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 19, 2013

Most entrepreneurs struggle with many startup Founders dilemmas in building their business, and these key dilemmas are probably the biggest source of pain and failure for the entrepreneur lifestyle. Should you start a company solo or find co-Founders to help you? The co-Founder relationship dilemma.

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David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

From RBI, Flexible VCs borrow the ability to reap meaningful returns without demanding founders build for an exit. Every Flexible VC structure allows founders to access immediate risk capital while preserving exit, growth trajectory, and ownership optionality. . Flexible VC 102: Variations.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 10, 2019

Most entrepreneurs struggle with many startup founders quandaries in building their business, and these key dilemmas are probably the biggest source of pain and failure for the entrepreneur lifestyle. Should you start a company solo or find co-founders to help you? The co-founder relationship dilemma.

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Version One Ventures

OCTOBER 31, 2016

More than 75 marketplace founders and investors attended the event – coming from as far as South Africa and Nova Scotia. As an investor and former founder, I know that scalable growth (and the pretty hockey stick graph) is the holy grail for every startup. Then, the startup needs to get strong product-market fit.

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Up and Running

FEBRUARY 12, 2018

Why do entrepreneurs sometimes resort to the “hockey stick forecast,” especially when they pitch to investors? I first heard the term in the 1980s, at lunch with a venture capitalist friend, when he said he was “tired of all those hockey stick forecasts” he was getting from startups. Forecasting screenshot from LivePlan.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

For a little while, the team can resort to the last defense of entrepreneurs in trouble: the promised hockey-stick. One thing that is often overlooked about the hockey-stick growth shape: its most distinctive characteristic is the long, flat part. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 14, 2014

Most entrepreneurs struggle with many startup Founders dilemmas in building their business, and these key dilemmas are probably the biggest source of pain and failure for the entrepreneur lifestyle. Should you start a company solo or find co-Founders to help you? The co-Founder relationship dilemma.

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Up and Running

OCTOBER 8, 2014

Founder Nick Woodman had recently been been on a surfing trip to Indonesia. When you play unicycle hockey, you typically use a unicycle, an ice-hockey stick and a tennis ball. To cater to a unicycle hockey player’s needs, Unicycle.com, headquartered in the UK, has decided to stock ice-hockey sticks.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 19, 2017

Most entrepreneurs struggle with many startup founders dilemmas in building their business, and these key dilemmas are probably the biggest source of pain and failure for the entrepreneur lifestyle. Should you start a company solo or find co-founders to help you? The co-founder relationship dilemma.

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Hockey Stick Cofounder Entrepreneur Liquidity Event 144

Reid Hoffman

DECEMBER 10, 2020

These are really good founders and I think this is an interesting space.” Further, when additional people kept mentioning Airbnb to me and praising the founders, I should have asked myself how a smart, capable person would refine the idea.). Those two minutes showed me that Airbnb’s founders wanted to play in the big leagues.

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The Next Web

JANUARY 16, 2017

We asked these companies to tell us the data backed story on how key decisions were made, which growth hacks led to the much loved hockey stick curve, and how this impacted their company. Today, Blacklane Co-Founder and CEO Jens Wohltorf shares the story of how the Blacklane went from one city to over 250 round the world.…

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The Next Web

NOVEMBER 28, 2016

We asked these companies to tell us the data backed story on how key decisions were made, which growth hacks led to the much loved hockey stick curve, and how this impacted their company. … This story continues at The Next Web.

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The Next Web

APRIL 22, 2016

With the advent and proliferation of “growth hacking”, many products are launching with hopes of leveraging data, A/B tests, and viral loops to manufacture a hockey stick growth curve. Instead, it looks more like this in the early days/months/years: Startups take off because the founders make them take off.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. More on that in a moment. They are close to breakeven.

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Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

At Hustle Fund, we back both first time founders as well as repeat founders. One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. Marketing first.

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Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

At Hustle Fund, we back both first time founders as well as repeat founders. One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. Marketing first.

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SoCal CTO

MAY 19, 2010

More likely, you'll be back for more money in less than 2 years, saying what everyone says: "it's taking longer than we thought" Investors won't believe your numbers anyway, so your over-sized hockey stick betrays your naiveté. See investment criteria #1 from TCA.

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The Equity Kicker

SEPTEMBER 8, 2015

AirBnB has delivered on the proverbial hockey stick growth that I imagine they had in their pitch deck back in 2010. In particular for founders who plan to emulate the success of AirBnB. This means that founders who want to grow as fast as AirBnB should be growing at well over 3.2x It was on Techcrunch this morning.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

A first order filter is whether the founders are aiming for a scalable startup. The question was: what did the founders want to do? The question was: what did the founders want to do? Will Harvey , Eric Ries and the other founders were unequivocal – “Screw the buy-out, we’re here to build a company. Go For Broke.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

They told the CEO (who was the technical founder) that the sales team should focus on “other markets.” The founder was doing his best to try to explain that his vision today was the same as when he pitched the company to the VC’s and when they funded the company. Because that’s not what the founders had built. What went wrong?

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David Cohen

JULY 29, 2015

The founders shut the business down, and either take a job or go out and start a new company with more of that plentiful seed funding. The hockey stick doesn’t emerge quite like you thought it would. Founders can live for a year or two on seed capital, have some fun, and punch their lottery ticket.

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Software By Rob

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

This article was a guest post by Bronson Taylor who is the host and co-founder of Growth Hacker TV , where the experts on startup growth reveal their secrets. VC companies need hockey stick growth. Escape velocity, in physics, is basically the speed needed to break free from gravity. Startups'

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thebarefootvc

DECEMBER 16, 2011

Discovery, in contrast to search, took center stage as Pinterest displayed hockey stick growth (and raised VC money near a $200M valuation in late 2011). Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley’s latest venture Profounder is one platform that could power these transactions.

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ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 31, 2010

Entrepreneur, investor and blogger Gabriel Weinberg has an excellent list of "traction verticals" that he curated earlier this year based on the dozens of interviews with fellow startup founders. founder Justin Kan went old school and gained traction through coverage in newspapers (remember those?).

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K9 Ventures

MAY 31, 2012

[I often end up repeating the same things to different founders. You hope that this founder/founding team will be able to figure things out. A Series A investor will look at these numbers and will hope that things will continue to trend in the right direction and in the best case scenario will start to hockey stick.

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Up and Running

JUNE 26, 2013

Bootstrapped, lean and already providing (in a small way at least) for the needs of my family and that of my co-founder. The day we set foot into the doors of the accelerator, we had a business that DHH would be proud of.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

Most important slide: hockey stick Micro-scale results Key questions: who is the customer, and how do you know? Most important slide: about the founders In a pitch meeting, try to spend as much time as possible talking about the key questions for your pitch. or drive traffic to that profitable destination?) who is the customer?

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

That year the two founders decided to get serious about being a company, and hired a CEO. The founders could have easily described the product as “the first packet-switched interactive messaging network.” The founders swallowed their pride and simply introduced the Blackberry as an “interactive pager.” They did none of that.

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K9 Ventures

MAY 31, 2012

[I often end up repeating the same things to different founders. You hope that this founder/founding team will be able to figure things out. A Series A investor will look at these numbers and will hope that things will continue to trend in the right direction and in the best case scenario will start to hockey stick.

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Professor VC

JUNE 7, 2018

However, a 4-slide demo day pitch deck showing the market (Venn diagram with giant TAM), team (4 pictures with logos of universities and unicorn startups), product (3 screenshots), and traction (hockey stick chart showing 11 days of growth) has gone way too far the other way.

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K9 Ventures

MARCH 2, 2017

Dear Founders, I know you are all super busy. And that is that founders get cocky. It’s not unexpected and it’s not unreasonable after the hard knocks we founders take in the early days. You convince the first co-founder to join. That is the point when founders start to develop a false confidence.

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Bryce Dot VC

APRIL 13, 2016

project, I’ve had the opportunity to speak candidly with a number of founders of recently fallen high flying startups. Too often the hockey stick graph became proxy for the health of the business. As with the effects of EPO, this left the startups these founders were building hollow shells of businesses.

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ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 19, 2016

You get more traffic, more conversions, more money – in an endless hockey stick shaped cycle. Paras Chopra , founder of VWO , answered a question about this on Quora. Therefore, the more you test and improve your site, the higher it should appear in the rankings. Of course, it’s not so simple. Image Source.

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Software By Rob

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

This article was a guest post by Bronson Taylor who is the host and co-founder of Growth Hacker TV , where the experts on startup growth reveal their secrets. VC companies need hockey stick growth. Escape velocity, in physics, is basically the speed needed to break free from gravity.

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Austin Startup

DECEMBER 7, 2010

As consumer technology companies begin to get off the ground and make forecasts, there is the inevitable user adoption hockey stick that rockets the local user count to ridiculous heights with no market budget but significant “viral effects&# and “social media.&# com) and Chicago (Do312.com),

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 21, 2010

Since we often invest before the big “hockey stick” traction that bigger VCs wait for, a lot of times the company is still trying to tweak exactly what service or application will take off in a given market. This is something that founders should pay a lot of attention to when choosing a partner.

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