Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. There was now a public market for companies with no revenue, no profit and big claims.

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

Early-stage investors in technology startups are only looking for growth-oriented companies that can achieve an “exit&# someday – either via selling your company to a larger company or via an IPO. million post-money valuation with no revenue. The former is much more likely than the latter. I raised my A round at a $31.5

Pre-Money Valuation 336

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Silicon Valley Stock 336

Cracking the Code

JULY 6, 2007

Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. SaaS business metrics: why are they different? The reason for this difference, from an investor perspective, is that the SaaS model provides far clearer visibility into future revenues. Friday, July 06, 2007.

Software Review 66

Software Review Metrics Valuation Technical Review 66

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 15, 2019

Pick a single metric that is the focus for all growth. Today’s world is full of metrics leading to business growth, including customer logins, revenue per customer, retention, and average solution price. Revenue and competitive position followed. Less is more. But never take your eye off today’s customer.

Social Media 218

Social Media India Acquisition China 218

Gust

JANUARY 31, 2013

Before the commercial Internet, the primary tools of disclosure included: Prospectus and related registration statement (“S-1″) for an IPO. Public companies have dealt with financial disclosure in ways that evolved over time with markets and technologies.

SEC 158

SEC Prospectus United States Technical Review 158

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

the consumer internet landscape in 2004 vs. today. In 2004, the consumer internet was just beginning to rebound. we had no revenue. In 2004, investors regained interest in the consumer internet again. As a result, we knew that our pitch would need to steer into investors’ biggest concern: the lack of revenue.

Entrepreneur 111

Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

Agile VC

MAY 26, 2011

Google is still a private company (their IPO was Aug 2004). is the leading consumer internet company with Terry Semel as CEO. One partnership was clearly very divided and a vocal minority of GPs thought consumer internet companies were a massive waste of time and money. link] leehower. link] leehower.

Term Sheet 178

Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

Agile VC

JUNE 5, 2011

So Groupon obviously filed their S-1 the other day to formally being the IPO process. They’ve grown from nothing to >$2B in revenue in 30 months time, making the company among the fastest growing businesses in the histroy of the world. Financial Snapshot: 2010 Revenue: $713M. in net revenue and passes $0.58

North America 100

North America Chicago Boston Silicon Valley 100

Cracking the Code

MAY 25, 2010

Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Labels: design , internet , sales and marketing. 5 comments: Radu Prisacaru - UK Internet Marketer. ipo process. Tuesday, May 25, 2010. "10 Posted by Philippe Botteri. at 5:39 PM. Super-Duper site! 4:45 AM.

Software Review 74

Software Review Cloud IPO Jordan 74

Ben's Blog

MARCH 24, 2011

To find out whether or not today’s public technology companies have hit bubble valuations, let’s compare some companies that survived the great bubble with their bubble era valuations: The Enterprise Value-to-Revenue multiple (EV/Rev) and Price-to-Earnings multiple (PE) are commonly used metrics to tell the valuation:value story.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Venture Capital Valuation Database 78

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 14, 2017

Pick a single metric that is the focus for all growth. Today’s world is full of metrics leading to business growth, including customer logins, revenue per customer, retention, and average solution price. Revenue and competitive position followed. Less is more. But never take your eye off today’s customer.

Social Media 163

Social Media India Acquisition China 163

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

This slinging of whatever against the wall to see what sticks does not a market make, is to me a sign of too much capital in the wrong hands, and it's already the most over invested area in recent years- in both human and financial capital- particularly relative to revenue. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Cracking the Code

NOVEMBER 10, 2009

Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. On the IPO front, LogMeIn made the news, being one of the few tech IPO on the NASDAAQ in 2009. Congrats to Jim Kelliher, CFO and Michael Simon, CEO, for a successful IPO! internet. (6). anecdotes. (13).

Software Review 48

Software Review Technical Review IPO Cloud 48

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Behind this analysis is a spreadsheet model, complete with detailed metrics for a set of customer behaviors that show just how valuable the new product will be. They are on-schedule and on-budget, but their gross metrics are way off. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

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. The same thing happened to many Internet stocks.

IPO 40

IPO Term Sheet Silicon Valley Valuation 40

Duct Tape Marketing

SEPTEMBER 10, 2019

And I’m guessing one of them certainly is a lot of, “What’s the revenue? So what’s your top-line revenue? The more revenue you have, the more valuable your company is going to be, generally. The more revenue you have, the more valuable your company is going to be, generally. Here’s why.

Entrepreneur 49

Entrepreneur Switzerland Revenue Differentiation 49

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis. I am chugging along.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. Even if it shows improvement in some micro metric, does that invalidate the overall design? That was evident in the metrics and in the in-person usability tests. No one feature is to blame.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

A business that strives for something like this should absolutely be charging money from day one, in order to establish baselines for their two key metrics: CPA (the cost to acquire a new customer) and LTV (the lifetime value of each acquired customer). This is the simplest ecosystem and simplest driver of growth. Sorry about that.)

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 4, 2008

Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. 2007 was a turning point for the SaaS industry with the successful IPOs of NetSuite, SuccessFactors, DemandTec, Salary.com, Aprimo and Constant Contact. What metrics should I be using to drive a saas business?

Software Review 48

Software Review South Korea IPO Portfolio 48

Cracking the Code

OCTOBER 10, 2008

Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Save Asia for post-IPO Single instance, multi-tenant, single datacenter - Have only one version of the code in production. Effectively measuring and understanding your CAC and CLTV metrics are key to future success.

Software Review 48

Software Review North America Europe Metrics 48

Cracking the Code

MARCH 10, 2008

Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. From our private investor experience, a breakeven in 1-2 year seems reasonable and if we look at Salesforce.com CAC ratio since its IPO, it is indeed within this 0.5-1 Cracking The Code. Monday, March 10, 2008.

Sales 79

Sales Software Review Marketing Technical Review 79

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And thanks to the radical transparency enabled by the internet, the quality of these proposals is actually constantly rising, to the point that it’s almost impossible to judge the quality of the final product – because all the proposals look polished and professional, even the terrible ones. What is the right revenue model?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

I understand why people would think that a consumer internet service like IMVU isnt really mission critical. Monitoring of real-world metrics. In order to make continuous deployment work, teams have to get good at automated monitoring and reacting to business and customer-centric metrics, not just technical metrics.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. Small batches also help deliver value earlier in the project. February 25, 2009 8:12 PM Anonymoussaid. Small is beautiful.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They asked for my advice, and we went through a number of recommendations that readers of this blog will already be able to guess: adding revenue opportunities, engagement loop optimization, and some immediate split-testing to figure out whats working and whats not. And we all know what the success rates of rewrites are! Homer said.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Luckily, the metrics helped us figure out the difference. Question 2: If your product has areas where people read and then different areas where people interact, are there ways to do metrics to determine where people spend their time? Were looking to metrics to determine how users interact with our product.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. The key is to be able to refute as many major hypotheses as you can. Were talking PayPal -sized variations. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

cdixon.org

AUGUST 3, 2012

Entrepreneurs and investors have been enamored with consumer internet startups for the last few years. Facebook’s market cap is about half of what most tech investors expected before the IPO. - Internet users have tens of thousands of services/apps to choose from but limited time and attention. .

Bridge Financing 86

Bridge Financing Early Stage Valuation Later Stage 86

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2020

This was supposed to be Airbnb's biggest year by many measures, including its IPO, which was one of the most anticipated since the 2008 financial crisis. 20:32) On believing in the internet as an immune system, then learning it's not and taking responsibility.(22:55) People, not just metrics. 37:30) Compassion in layoffs. (39:37)

Silicon Valley 60

Silicon Valley Hosting Cofounder Employee 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168