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M&A or IPO?

Reid Hoffman

The fundamental choice that venture-backed entrepreneurs face is simple: M&A or IPO? This strategic value-oriented approach is one of the things that gives Silicon Valley its crazy reputation among traditional investors, who live and die by financial metrics. That focus on short-term financial metrics is shortsighted.

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6 Key Rules To Stay Competitive In The Digital World

Startup Professionals Musings

Simple metrics and your personal knowledge of the industry can’t keep up with all the relevant competitive forces. That means that many companies are now forgoing the rush to go public (IPO), in favor of major equity investments from specialized venture capital funds, such as Japan’s SoftBank. You need to be part of a larger ecosystem.

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What Does the Post Crash VC Market Look Like?

Both Sides of the Table

What You Can Learn From Public Markets It doesn’t really take a genius to realize that what happens in the public markets will filter back to the private markets because the ultimate exit of these companies is either an IPO or an acquisition (often by a public company whose valuation is fixed daily by the market).

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Praying to the God of Valuation

Both Sides of the Table

And then in the late 90’s money crept in, swept in to town by public markets, instant wealth and an absurd sky-rocketing of valuations based on no reasonable metrics. We wanted new things to exist and to solve new problems and to see our creations come to life.

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The Killer IPOs That Are Making Tech Startups Look Like Amateurs

ReadWriteStart

In this article, we delve into the world of tech-ish companies and explore the seismic impact of initial public offerings (IPOs) on their growth and profitability. In a landscape where IPOs are few and far between, certain tech companies have managed to seize the moment and captivate the market with their stellar public offerings.

IPO 107
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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

As a reminder, the Dot Com bubble was a five-year period from August 1995 (the Netscape IPO ) when there was a massive wave of experiments on the then-new internet, in commerce, entertainment, nascent social media, and search. Massive liquidity awaited the first movers to the IPO’s, and that’s how they managed their portfolios.

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Why vanity metrics are dangerous

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, December 23, 2009 Why vanity metrics are dangerous In a previous post, I defined two kinds of metrics: vanity metrics and actionable metrics. In this post, Id like to talk about the perils of vanity metrics. My personal favorite vanity metrics is "hits."

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