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Startup Stock Options – Why A Good Deal Has Gone Bad

Steve Blank

We slept under the tables, and pulled all-nighters to get to first customer ship, man the booths at trade shows or ship products to make quarterly revenue – all because it was “our” company. Startup Compensation Changes with Growth Capital – 12 Years to an IPO. That made sense.

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JOBS Act to Change Startup Funding Landscape

ReadWriteStart

IPOs by year, 1980-2011, with pre-IPO last 12-month sales less than (small firms) or greater than (large firms) $50 million (2009 purchasing power). But it could affect one thing right away: the level of buzz and information surrounding young IPOs, which no longer have to keep mum. Number of U.S. Credit: Prof.

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Quickly Unpacking Two Recent Acquisitions (of Cylance; of PlanGrid)

Haystack

Khosla Ventures has quietly been on a roll over the past few years, most recently with Square (a monster, monster return, assuming they held post-IPO) and Guardant, among others; and they old early shares in Instacart, DoorDash, OpenDoor, and many winners in the most recent unicorn crop. The company only raised a bit over $1M as seed capital.

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Startup Fairy Tales and Other Tall Tales That Venture Capitalists Tell

Growthink Blog

With this seed capital – more often than not totaling between $100,000 and $1,000,000 - the company accomplishes a number of key technical milestones, gets a beta customer or two, and then goes on a "road show" to venture capitalists around the country for capital to “scale” the business. read more.

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Convertible Debt: Worst Form Of Seed Financing — Except For All The Others

Gust

Turn the question on its head: How could it make sense to lend money to a brand new, seed-stage company with no revenue, no products, and no collateral? (You In that sense it’s more like a warrant or option with a zero exercise price.). How can this possibly make sense? You won’t see banks doing that.)

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Surviving 2016 as a seed stage startup: Don’t batten down the hatches but take an umbrella.

Hippoland

(Note: these are my opinions and not my employer’s): 1) Raising seed capital from VCs who invest in all stages will become challenging. Investors who invest at all stages are increasingly reserving more capital for follow-on to keep their existing portfolio companies afloat longer. Keep your burn low.

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The Fallacy of Channels: Startups Beware

Both Sides of the Table

I’ve seen way too many startups spend all their energy getting channel deals done only to find out that they don’t produce ANY revenue. The price points are not as high as your beautiful Excel spreadsheet had forecasted when you raised your seed capital. Full Stop for you Brits.) You need to market your product.

Channel 293