Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

When you first start your company and raise initial venture capital your board probably consists of 1-3 founders and 1-2 VCs. Over time you start to figure out who you customers are and how to sell to them or how to get them to adopt your products if you’re a consumer-oriented startup. In the Early Days.

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Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. (My It was a long way from Ellis Island.)

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

David Teten

JANUARY 21, 2021

This essay is part of a series on alternative VC: I: Revenue-Based Investing: a new option for founders who care about control. II: Who are the major Revenue-Based Investing VCs? III: Why are Revenue-Based VCs investing in so many women and underrepresented founders? IV: Should your new VC fund use Revenue-Based Investing?

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Equity Revenue Cofounder Colorado 78

Hearpreneur

DECEMBER 8, 2019

This focus has helped me recruit the best and the brightest in the field, build a world-class operation, and most of all, with all the knowledge in a specific vertical, help build a leading agency for food & beverage manufacturers that are looking to build a direct to consumer channel. Photo Credit: Matt Daigle.

Entrepreneur 115

Entrepreneur Technical Review Vertical Las Vegas 115

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. would look in each of the verticals. For example, How does sales differ from one market to another?

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

More than investment, entertainment is one of the largest industries in the world in revenue terms, projected to reach $2.5 And last year alone Audible generated $1 billion in revenue for Amazon. . Entertainment is more than newspapers, more than Hollywood, and more than the sum of specific verticals jousting for consumer eyeballs.

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Vertical Artificial Inteligence Distribution IPO 113

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

This tendency is a two edged sword: by iterating strategy a startup can dramatically improve the size and trajectory of the company, but at times this process can be the bane of venture investors (and why they have prematurely grey hair.)

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

View from Seed

MARCH 29, 2018

We wanted to learn more about the nuanced industry market forces before applying the same hands-on investing model we do with tech startups in other verticals. The venture capital market in this category is fairly concentrated among series A and expansion-stage funds that prefer to invest in companies with substantial revenue.

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Vertical Stealth Portfolio Seed Capital 120

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 14, 2021

The Startup Magazine continues our Founder Interview series with entrepreneur Richard Lavina, Co-Founder and CEO of accounting services platform, Taxfyle. Here are Richard’s insights and startup advice he shared with us about his entrepreneurial journey…. TSM: Taxfyle is really no longer a startup, it is a “scaleup”.

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CPA Founder Vertical Cofounder 136

The Equity Kicker

MAY 9, 2016

I just read Nicolas Colin’s Brief History of the World (of Venture Capital). We can generalise this into a blueprint for ecosystems generally: Find a vertical market where there is a comparative advantage – Silicon Valley started with military technology, in London fintech and ecommerce are good candidates.

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Silicon Valley Venture Capital eCommerce Startup 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 6, 2011

This curriculum is based on the various questions entrepreneurs have asked me over these 64 sessions, spanning financing, positioning, customer acquisition, marketing, sales, channel, and various other early stage, startup-related issues. John already has a couple of customers, and needs about 50 customers to get to $1M in annual revenue.

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Vertical Web San Francisco Entrepreneur 115

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. No one had sat the marketing department down and defined what our department Mission (with a capital “M”) was. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Austin Startup

JUNE 22, 2020

They have a $600k sales backlog that they’ll complete this month, and about 50% or more of that will be recurring revenue. The product is a complex AI service in an industry vertical that is large and growing fast. How could a company only six months old have $600k in revenue this month? What was Oksana’s response?

Vertical 64

Vertical Early Stage Forecast Revenue 64

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. He’s Only in Field Service When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “ Serial Communications Controller &# ( SCC ).

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup. Lets see why.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Mucker Lab

DECEMBER 2, 2015

Most brilliant “Internet of Things” ideas are quicksand for capital unless you have the branding, vertical integration and customer lock-in that Apple achieved. 20 years ago, a majority of “Sand Hill” venture capital went into enterprise-focused startups. The iPod model will separate IoT platforms from fads.

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Vertical Widget Distribution China 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

In other words, they are facing conditions of extreme uncertainty, just like startups. But, as any startup can tell you, this opens up a tremendous set of opportunities for the rest of us. We faced this same problem in entrepreneurship and venture capital, but we are getting past it. What is the right revenue model?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Many thanks, you’ve changed my startup a hundred times already. Maybe the core of what you talk about in getting companies to success lies in the answer to these 2 questions. Oh, I absolutely love your “I was having coffee with person the other day&# stories. Keep ‘em coming.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Austin Startup

DECEMBER 20, 2020

The Howdy Austin mural commissioned by Ride|Austin Here is your home page to get started and meet all of the people you need to know to plug into the Austin tech startup scene?—?the the Connectors, Angels, Venture Capitalists, Founders, Professors, Hackers, Press… and the Legends. STOIKY is his callsign.

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Austin Texas Cofounder Los Angeles 110

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. It has become an integral part of startup culture.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Joseph Campbell’s insight of the repeatable patterns in mythology is equally applicable to building a successful startup. All startups (whether a new division inside a larger corporation or in the canonical garage) follow similar patterns—a series of steps which, when followed, can eliminate a lot of the early wandering in the dark.

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 127

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Private equity and venture capital investors are copying our sisters in the hedge fund world: we’re trying to automate more of our job. . See Bessemer Venture Partners’ A comprehensive guide to security for startups. 645 Ventures released a cap table simulator to help level the playing field. 2) Market .

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

The myth about pivots is that they are an exception: something undesirable that happens because a startup went seriously awry, and which you should strive to avoid. Actually, startups, like all businesses, work because of a cycle of invention and reinvention. In reality, pivots are an integral part of the entrepreneurial process.

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Startup Silicon Valley Business Model Mobile 36

Hunter Walker

MAY 20, 2018

The idea was to build a publishing-focused brand with events as a revenue base while we figured out our own differentiation in a crowded market — and then added business lines around advertising, custom content and now subscriptions. How should media entrepreneurs weigh funding options for their startups?

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PR Media Differentiation Audience 64

Austin Startup

AUGUST 7, 2017

The time has come for the Texas startup community to band together to change the world once again. Texas has produced world-changing startups in the past such as Dell Software , National Instruments and Whole Foods Market but all of those were founded more than 30 years ago. We truly are an accelerator of the Austin startup ecosystem.

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Texas San Antonio Houston Dallas 97

Gust

OCTOBER 12, 2011

To provide some reference points, I surveyed thirteen angels groups in North American to determine their recent experience in negotiating the pre-money valuation of pre-revenue companies. See the 2010 data reported here: Current Pre-money Valuations of Pre-revenue Companies. Pre-money Valuation of Pre-revenue Companies.

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Angel Groups Valuation Pre-Money Valuation St. Louis 125

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

The best entrepreneurship textbooks and blogs assume that advice to startups is generalizable. But as I learned from my students this “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work for all startups. Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs.

Vertical 149

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 149

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

But entrepreneurial leaders sometimes forget that in startups, you can’t allow a “corner case” to derail fearless decision making. Achieving consensus about every corner case from each stakeholder in the room is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 176

VC Cafe

APRIL 29, 2020

Source: NVCA , “Startup Ecosystem Faces Capital Crunch over Coming Months” USA – SBA Loans and PPP. The $349 billion aid package issued by the US Government and distributed in the form of SBA loans was quickly gobbled up by a large number of applications, many of which were from venture-backed or PE-backed startups.

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SBA Technical Review Startup 124

The Next Web

OCTOBER 2, 2013

The larger your customer base, the more opportunities for monetization, and therefore the more attractive your startup is for investors. In this aspect, China’s huge market seems ripe for the taking — and which firms are better-placed to do so than homegrown startups, especially app developers looking to conquer the mobile market?

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China Developer Intellectual Property Mobile 122

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

We Changed Our Mind In 1966, 10 years after Hewlett’s memo, Hewlett Packard’s revenue and headcount had grown ten fold; $200 million and 11,000 employees – all from test and measurement equipment. And venture capital and entrepreneurship has made life even tougher for the modern corporation.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 164

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. The goal of their startup in this stage becomes “getting funded.”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Not All Startups Are Alike There’s an urban legend that Eskimos-Aleuts have more words to describe snow than other cultures.

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. Historically, these were two guys with high testosterone. They hit each other with baseball bats until one of them dropped.) This first Zen moment happened at a SuperMac exec staff meeting.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Hunter Walker

JULY 18, 2022

Why I’m Not Telling Every Startup To ‘Pull The Brakes’ Just Yet. Your runway is impacted by the absence of projected revenue. And your investors start to worry that you don’t have a great handle on your business, which means any new capital infusion could be eaten up without getting to the next milestone successfully.

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Valuation Cap Table Startup Later Stage 117