Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Startups still need capital to scale once they find good product-market fit and a repeatable-scalable business model.). They failed due to: the dearth of deals in the region that have IPO potential and. The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0 Large regionally based early stage funds have mostly failed.

Early Stage 287

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 287

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 22, 2017

Corporate transactions including mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and initial public offerings (IPO) bring necessary capital and resources to a growing company. Do IPOs also necessitate an additional policy? In 2014, IPO activity grew substantially until it reached its current rate – the highest in the last six years.

IPO 147

IPO Prospectus Merger Initial Public Offering 147

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 21, 2021

Many entrepreneurs never get past their first-stage focus on their innovative product, to scaling the business globally, organizing a structure to handle thousands of employees, and concentrating their focus “on the business” rather than working “in the business.” Switch your focus from product development to sales.

Merger 379

Merger Due Diligence SEC IPO 379

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. I met one recently that is working on a really innovative product, and the stories I heard from their development team made me want to cringe.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 10, 2018

You’ll find exceptions to this rule, like Snapchat, which was operating at a loss at its IPO, when it experienced high initial trading prices due to its huge popularity and untapped monetization capabilities. Another important metric is churn. This the first and foremost way to begin evaluating the sellability of your company.

Valuation 145

Valuation Technical Review Exit Strategy Metrics 145

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 15, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 15, 2010 Some IPO speculation Inspired by Steve Blank’s post today about the “lost decade&# of IPO’s , I’d like to make some predictions. The fact that IPO’s are disappearing makes intuitive sense to me. New products become commoditized too fast.

IPO 166

IPO San Francisco Lean Silicon Valley 166

crowdSPRING Blog

MAY 25, 2011

Product design means saying ‘no’ to 1,000 good ideas – [link]. Excellent tips for startups on hiring product managers – [link]. Interesting perspective on LinkedIn’s IPO – arguing that the IPO price was reasonable – [link]. Where are the women? – [link].

Social Media 86

Social Media Small Business Design Media 86

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 3, 2021

To keep you on a positive track with potential investors, I recommend the following logic principles, to balance your passion in presenting your vision of a new business: Make sure your plan includes some business metrics. Equity investors realize that they won’t see any real return until an exit occurs, such as a sale, merger, or IPO.

Exit Strategy 406

Exit Strategy Merger Angel Investor IPO 406

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. You’re unlikely to want to make this sort of investment with the product or the market not yet validated.

Pre-Money Valuation 336

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Silicon Valley Stock 336

NZ Entrepreneur

SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

experiments to build a product, find customers, test business models and hire amazing people. The culture in a startup is also about moving fast, making informed guesses, learning when things go wrong (which they often will), and iterating and reiterating the design of the product or service until you get it right. Risk and reward.

Technical Review 88

Technical Review Software Review New Zealand Due Diligence 88

Mucker Lab

APRIL 6, 2023

Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series. The other dimension you need to think about is the product complexity. As an individual user, I have absolutely no interest in using this product myself or testing it out.

Product 78

Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. We didnt think wed able to compete with that.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2011

I find it amusing when a journalist writes an article about a prominent startup (either privately held or preparing for an IPO) and decries that, “They’re not even profitable!” They have have raised $2-3 million, built a product that has some amount of market traction and got to annualized revenues of around $1 million.

Startup 418

Startup Revenue Technical Review Flash 418

crowdSPRING Blog

JANUARY 18, 2013

The Science of Productivity: How To Get More Done In Less Time - [link]. The Science of Productivity: How To Get More Done In Less Time – [link]. Thanks To Facebook, Strongest Year For IPOs Since 2000 With $21.5 The 6 Marketing Metrics Your CEO Actually Cares About [Cheat Sheet] | Hubspot Blog - [link].

Social Media 94

Social Media Small Business Design Media 94

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. Choose one.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

ReadWriteStart

JULY 18, 2011

Kedrosky: "In the 90's I was an analyst through all this [tech investment and IPO] madness. Think about it that way, filling up their shelves with product. You want to build your own IPO and exit. I look for a smart ass team, building a kick ass product, in a big ass market," he said. You in this room are the inventory.

Investment Bankers 153

Investment Bankers Technical Review Cofounder Due Diligence 153

BeyondVC

APRIL 4, 2018

Look at the Dropbox IPO which priced above its initial value and came out white hot at the end of one of the worst weeks in stock market performance. There will also still be some amazing companies that raise their Series C, D and beyond funding rounds with scaling metrics.

Cloud 60

Cloud Agile Architecture Azure 60

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 29, 2018

one that got us into a new vertical or geography or product line. If we couldn’t sell our first product for that, which was Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews, then it probably wasn’t worth selling in the first place because we could have never built into a SaaS company that had a viable financial profile.

Bootstrapping 52

Bootstrapping IPO Business Model Software Review 52

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Five Whys has its origins in the Toyota Production System. And yet the key to startup speed is to maintain a disciplined approach to testing and evaluating new products, features, and ideas. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Speed up or slow down?

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Mucker Lab

OCTOBER 12, 2016

Why should a public market downturn determine an investment in a startup that has seven to 10 years to go before it can even think about an IPO? But many of today’s billion dollar venture firms invest in four-person startups as well as pre-IPO startups with thousands of employees. The winners will chart their own path.

Harvest 60

Harvest Vertical IPO Early Stage 60

Ben's Blog

OCTOBER 29, 2020

Since then, the debate over IPOs has continued, with a particular focus on allegedly underpriced offerings that jump shortly after opening — the dreaded “pop.” ” As some criticism has it, this supposedly deprives companies of millions of dollars that should have been theirs if not for underpricing the IPO.

IPO 36

IPO Securities and Exchange Commission Demand SEC 36

View from Seed

MARCH 3, 2015

Ellie Mirman was the first marketer hired by the CMO of HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software startup that IPOed in 2014. NextView Ventures: Thinking back to before anyone knew HubSpot or the company was headed towards an IPO, where did you even start to market the company? How did you address that?

Marketing 120

Marketing Sales Cycle Startup CTO Hire 120

David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

This structure allows for alignment on the front end, and real-time flexibility for performance metrics,” says Samira Salman , a family office investor and advisor. . Flexible VCs have created structures based on other company performance metrics than revenues, such as profits or founder salaries. Flexible VC 102: Variations.

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

In 2001 companies IPO’d very quickly if they were working, by 2011 IPOs had slowed down to the point that in 2013 Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures astutely called billion-dollar outcomes “unicorns.” We can’t wait for customers to use the product for 12–18 months and do customer interviews or look at purchase cohorts.

Pre-Money Valuation 471

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Venture Capital Early Stage 471

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 8, 2010 Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Review) The next article in my series on entrepreneurship for Harvard Business Review is live today. Once again, we revisit the topic of Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics. Remember "metrics are people, too."

Metrics 121

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 121

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

► 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.

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Everyone was in the flow; the team was hyper-productive. In many cases, they did the impossible, building a new product faster, cheaper, and better than anyone could have predicted.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 23, 2013

Marketo filed for IPO with impressive 80% year-over-year growth in 2012, with almost $60m in revenue. of revenue, force-feeding sales pipelines with an unprofitable product. Another way to think about these solutions is that a SaaS business cannot have static fundamental metrics. Except, they lost $35m. for every $1.00

Business Model 335

Business Model .Net Revenue IPO 335

ConversionXL

AUGUST 13, 2019

SaaS sales and marketing teams can get overwhelmed by metrics. But without any metrics, it’s impossible to track growth. If growth is the best way to get out alive, marketing metrics do little unless they correlate with sales. According to Gartner , three metrics form the foundation for those growth levers: (Image source).

Metrics 117

Metrics SQL Retention Churn Rate 117

Growthink Blog

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

In that same time frame, United States IPO volume declined 75% in real terms and now accounts for less than 11% of the global total. 7 Companies in China have raised more than $1 billion in an IPO this year. IPO by far this year will be the government ward General Motors. A strong results and metrics-focused approach.

Africa 104

Africa Brazil China India 104

Agile VC

MAY 26, 2011

Google is still a private company (their IPO was Aug 2004). Yes… he was a very successful PayPal exec and previously co-founder & VP Product of SocialNet. Not long after the product launch we began the initial conversations with VCs for a Series A round. is the leading consumer internet company with Terry Semel as CEO.

Term Sheet 178

Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

Hunter Walker

JANUARY 17, 2014

During my more than nine years as a Google product lead and now as a partner at Homebrew, I’ve seen many discussions between a rock star at a big company and a startup founder go awry. One way to suss this out – ask the co-workers about the metrics or key performance indicators they owned. Who did they report to?

IPO 86

IPO Cofounder Hiring Reputation 86

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 14, 2012

IPO stands for Initial Public Offering, and is the first sale of a private stock to the public. Most recently, the mass media has been concerned with the Facebook IPO. EBITDA, or Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization, is a metric of measurement of cash earnings that is generally non-GAAP.

Non-disclosure Agreement 202

Non-disclosure Agreement NDA IPO Covenant 202

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. This kind of result is typical when you ship a redesign of some part of your product. Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. First of all, why split-test? One last note on reporting.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Way back when the money was doled out, the team made a compelling pitch about the large market that was going to adopt their new innovative product or service. They are on-schedule and on-budget, but their gross metrics are way off.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Reid Hoffman

DECEMBER 10, 2020

With Airbnb’s IPO, I thought the time was right to take a look back at the past decade (Greylock led Airbnb’s Series A in November 2010) and reflect on what I learned from the journey. Couchsurfing is a bad product experience. it took years for Airbnb’s metrics to really start accelerating. HOW GREYLOCK INVESTED IN AIRBNB.

Hosting 69

Hosting Hockey Stick IPO Silicon Valley 69

View from Seed

MAY 16, 2019

Even before that, we all knew that it was among the most rapidly growing SaaS companies in recent years and a product used (and loved) by millions of people. I have friends who are execs or shareholders of the company, but I have no stake in Slack nor intent to invest in the IPO. Revenue growth rate of 82% year over year.

Lock-up Period 168

Lock-up Period Retention Azure .Net 168