David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

However, in private markets, there is more room to optimize across all 11 steps of the investing process: firm management , marketing, fundraising , origination , manage relationships, due diligence, negotiation, monitoring, portfolio acceleration , reporting, and.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

In his tenure as CEO of DataSift we have never missed a monthly revenue figure. He has grown our US operations from 1 employee (him) to a global organization of 75 employees that will finish the year with 8-digit revenues (90+% recurring) and more than 350% year-over-year growth. Please meet her while she’s there.”

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

More and more startups are pursuing Revenue-Based VCs , but “RBI” doesn’t fit everyone. Flexible VC 101: Equity Meets Revenue Share. By tying payments to actual revenues, founders and investors remain aligned around the company’s real-time performance, good or bad. Of the Inc. 5000 companies, only 6.5% raised from angels.

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

In fact, it was only 7 years ago that Apple shipped its first iPhone and Google introduced its Android operating system. Companies horde cash and squeeze the most revenue and margin from the money they use. Metrics like Return on Net Assets, Return on Capital and Internal Rate of Return are the guiding stars of the board and CEO.

Private Equity 325

Private Equity Metrics China Intellectual Property 325

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers? What metrics do we use to see if we learned enough in Customer Discovery ? And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?” End of theory.&#

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

David Teten

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Instead of budget approvals, monitor key metrics and give managers more flexibility. So here’s the solution I have recommended to some of my portfolio companies: “ agile budgeting ”, i.e., monitoring a few key variables while giving managers significant flexibility. Traditional budgets can be destructive and a huge waste of time.

Agile 60

Agile Management Forecast Silicon Valley 60

Duct Tape Marketing

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

Our discussion begins with his latest book, “ Get Scalable: The Operating System Your Business Needs to Run and Scale Without You. 04:05] How does the operating system viewpoint apply to business owners? [05:54] Today we're going to talk about a new book called Get Scalable, the Operating System. So Ryan, welcome back.

Engineer 71

Engineer Software Review Operations Founder 71

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

In an over-funding environment companies are encouraged to eschew revenues in a land grab to acquire eyeballs, clicks, page views or whatever other vanity metrics give VCs the false comfort that they’re sitting on a gold mine. The opportunity to transact at the point of purchase increases the sheer number of revenue opportunities.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

Reid Hoffman

AUGUST 6, 2020

As the Greylock team has learned after decades of partnering with early-stage founders, the best approach is establishing a core set of fundamental questions that can be tailored to each individual company, rather than looking at a rigid set of metrics. WHAT METRICS SHOULD A FOUNDER SHOW TO RAISE A SERIES A FROM A VC FIRM LIKE GREYLOCK?

Technical Review 69

Technical Review Seed Stage Software Review Early Stage 69

View from Seed

NOVEMBER 18, 2014

Recently, we looked at our own portfolio at NextView Ventures to dig a little deeper on how startups actually raise that next round of financing. in our portfolio. 4 Operating Philosophies Affecting Series A Raises. Generate Real Revenue. Another approach to raise Series A is to drive meaningful revenue.

Syndicate 333

Syndicate Syndication Seed Stage Startup 333

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Blog About Log in Register Designing startup metrics to drive successful behavior Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. Good metrics should also be actionable, and drive successful behavior. In a follow up post, I will use this technique to walk through the design of a set of metrics for a SaaS company.

Metrics 55

Metrics Design Entrepreneur Startup 55

The Equity Kicker

FEBRUARY 8, 2012

Starting with ‘customer’, unsurprisingly, the more customers and revenues a company has the more a VC will look to what they are doing to tell him or her whether the product is good. VCs without experience (which can come from either investing or operating) often struggle to differentiate between a good product and a bad one.

Technical Review 123

Technical Review Product Venture Capital Valuation 123

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 25, 2018

Bogdanovich, who’s worked with dozens of companies on Salesforce integration and marketing automation, sketched an order of operations for data acquisition and deployment in demand gen campaigns: Bring clean data into the CRM. Tom Tunguz offers a framework that uses a scale from 1 to 10 to assess demand generation portfolios: 1.

Demand 132

Demand Vertical Campaign Channel 132

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

An investor had few hard metrics other than the actual financials, and little technology to make the process scaleable. Over the past few decades, better metrics became available, and investors could take a more analytical, data-driven approach. ” Historically, investing was a manual, artisan process. 9% (1 / 12).

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Recently, I’ve been working with a few of our portfolio companies to help them think about how to recruit and interview their first analytics hire. Analytics is about designing, reporting, and leveraging operating metrics to aid strategic and functional decision-making.

Analytics 149

Analytics Hiring SQL Forecast 149

ConversionXL

JANUARY 9, 2019

Marketing, product, sales, and operations. Is it higher usability metrics, like task completion and conversions, or something beyond analytics, like revenue? Test each iteration of your design and compare the results to the baseline metrics you established on your first run. A portfolio of UX work. Engineering.

Design 131

Design Software Review Audio Technical Review 131

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

Across our portfolio and in my own entrepreneurial experience, I have seen three main sales models work successfully in scaling B2B sales: 1) Enterprise; 2) Telephone; and 3) Developer-driven. To that point, a well-run telesales operation will be super metrics-driven. to, finally, $2M in annual quota.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

ConversionXL

MARCH 19, 2020

The HBR study contrasts Office Depot and Staples during the 2000 recession: Office Depot cut 6% of its workforce, but it couldn’t reduce operating costs significantly. At the same time, the company contained its operating costs and came out of the recession stronger, bigger, and more profitable than it had been in 1999. Image source ).

Marketing 121

Marketing Campaign Non-Compete Lean 121

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 26, 2022

What guidance for your portfolio companies? I think every company’s portfolio is different, so they’re all different sizes, different stages, different geographies, different cash positions, and different market leadership positions. . I will say the one thing we tell all our portfolio companies is to get fit and lean in.

Partner 132

Partner Cofounder Retention Acquisition 132

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

It doesn’t matter whether an entrepreneur is in our portfolio, whether we’re considering an investment, or whether we’re casually meeting for the first time. we had no revenue. As a result, we knew that our pitch would need to steer into investors’ biggest concern: the lack of revenue. Investors see a lot of pitches.

Entrepreneur 111

Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

K9 Ventures

MAY 28, 2015

At K9 we invest in companies which have a clear/direct revenue model and typically don’t invest in companies that follow the Ubiquity first Revenue Later (URL) revenue model made famous by Eric Schmidt in 2007. I call this Revenue Development and have written about it before. >$0/month. That’s real money.

Revenue 48

Revenue Startup Burn Rate Cofounder 48

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. While there was an occasional bad apple, the public markets rewarded companies with revenue growth and sustainable profits. What Do VC’s Do?

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

What CEOs, management teams and shareholders care about is growth —revenue growth, greater user adoption, increased market share, bigger margins, etc. In our case, we’re local in over 200 countries with operations in basically every city on the planet. Using an alternative process including different systems and metrics is key.

Lean 326

Lean Nepal Cofounder Customer Development 326

David Teten

AUGUST 6, 2015

My colleague Paul Bianco serves as interim CFO for a number of ff Venture Capital ’s portfolio companies, and has built and reviewed hundreds of financial models. More reasonable: a company with a direct sales model may drive revenue growth based on the number of productive sales reps and a quota, with a target that is higher over time.

Balance Sheet 60

Balance Sheet Software Review Forecast Acquisition 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 10, 2011

I hear similar things for pre-revenue startups that are on schedule, on time, and on budget - even though they are busy building something that nobody wants. (In I have seen founders replaced because their style seemed too chaotic, even though what’s really happening is that they are operating at startup speed. That's a waste of time.

Silicon Valley 167

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Investment Bankers 167

Austin Startup

MAY 19, 2018

Explain conflict rationale A handful of really great VCs declined to invest in my company and they had the courtesy of telling me that they felt like Company X in their portfolio would be a conflict. That imagined conflict may actually be a great partnership opportunity for two portfolio companies to collaborate. That’s awesome.

Founder 75

Founder Early Stage Software Review Deal Flow 75

Up and Running

FEBRUARY 17, 2016

For Dan Hughes, Director of Operations at startup brewery ColdFire Brewing, he and his brother have been hard at work on business development and recipe formulation, navigating bureaucracy, and enduring the inevitable delays that come with brewery construction, equipment delivery, and regulatory approval. But they all take so much time.

Oregon 60

Oregon Jordan SBA Cofounder 60

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 13, 2013

They want to see cash flow quickly (you cannot wait 2-3 years before determining your revenue model, like in Silicon Valley), so make sure you’re ready for this next step and have a solid plan in place on how to accomplish it. Valuations are based more on typical later-stage type of metrics.

Asia 132

Asia Silicon Valley India Term Sheet 132

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

Creating and showing constant momentum through personal portfolio projects and volunteering is a powerful means of landing a new job as a product manager, especially if one has never officially held the professional title “Product Manager.” But more often than not, your product is bigger than the features and the code. or developers?—?are

Management 85

Management Product Technical Review Software Review 85

Cracking the Code

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

A few days ago, Bessemer West Coast SaaS Practice - David Cowan , Byron Deeter and myself, hosted a CFO Dinner for our SaaS portfolio at John Bentleys in Redwood City. Fifteen CFOs participated - about half of them from Bessemer portfolio SaaS companies (Cornerstone On Demand, Intacct. With this decline, the average EV/08 rev.

Software Review 48

Software Review Technical Review Valuation Portfolio 48

VC Adventure

MARCH 19, 2020

As you can imagine we’ve been having conversations all week across the Foundry portfolio (which includes not just companies but also our ~ 35 fund investments; between those we have look-through into a few thousand companies). Stress test your operating plan. And to be clear, it’s going to be deep. More, not less.

Balance Sheet 69

Balance Sheet Portfolio Stock Early Stage 69

K9 Ventures

JUNE 5, 2015

So while the infrastructure cost and startup costs may have declined, the operating costs have increased. As the check size increases, investors tend to look for more traction, established revenue models, proven unit-economics, and other metrics that were previously associated with later stage companies. Implications for LPs.

Seed Stage 48

Seed Stage Venture Capital Early Stage Valuation 48

Cracking the Code

OCTOBER 10, 2008

Be prepared to cross the desert - SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up front for a multi-year stream of revenue, so it demands enough investment capital to fund 4+ years of runway. Effectively measuring and understanding your CAC and CLTV metrics are key to future success. Great list! I particularly agree on points #2 and #4.

Software Review 48

Software Review North America Europe Metrics 48

www.readwriteweb.com

MARCH 7, 2011

Since most companies have little to no revenue, who else has already invested in the deal is heavily weighted to prove value. Instead of investors holding onto proprietary connections and introductions for their portfolio companies, these relationships are being displaced by the dominate social networks ( Facebook , Linkedin , Quora ).

Technical Review 50

Technical Review Due Diligence Startup Angel Investor 50

abovethecrowd.com

OCTOBER 17, 2013

I immediately reached out to the founder and CEO, Katrina Lake , who had previously worked for another Benchmark portfolio company in the fashion space, Polyvore. For starters, the business metrics are quite compelling. Lastly, I asked a few women that were not customers to try the service.

eCommerce 62

eCommerce Technical Review North America San Francisco 62

The Equity Kicker

JANUARY 10, 2020

They find a niche in the market where they can grow some revenues and then they raise some more money. And what are the metrics for customer love? As you operate at the early stage, how do you help a company scale? For a high growth business, that can mean a 100% increase in key metrics and a much bigger valuation next time.

Partner 68

Partner Early Stage Portfolio Metrics 68

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Managers in this area have to take a portfolio approach, promoting ideas that work and might make good candidates for further investment. Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88