Hunter Walker

OCTOBER 31, 2020

So I’ve found that when you’re not already ‘in the door’ at a firm (ie went to school with the senior GP’s kids, worked at a startup they backed) that there are four different types of “qualifications” they are seeking. Qualification #3: You understand a specific complex technology that is a current or emerging investment theme for the firm.

North Carolina 91

North Carolina Hiring Angel Investor Technical Review 91

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 21, 2009

On the third Wednesday of every month I co-chair a meeting called the SoCal VCA (venture capital alliance), which represents participants from all of the top venture capital firms in Southern California as well as prominent members of the Tech Coast Angels (TCA). with only 19% saying they would decrease levels.

Technical Review 241

Technical Review IPO Southern California Venture Capital 241

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. Convergent Technologies was one of those OEM suppliers. Their engineers hated us.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. What Do VC’s Do?

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

And he recognized it was making his startup feel and act like a big ponderous company. Most decisions in a startup must be made in the face of uncertainty. One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. The same is true in your company.

Silicon Valley 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

I love being in VC because I get the opportunity to learn about new technologies and industries every day. Each month, we pick an up-and-coming vertical or theme and do a deep dive (with the help of Mattermark … portfolio plug). And being thesis-driven makes us more efficient when filtering through all the startups we see.

Venture Capital 162

Venture Capital Portfolio Vertical Technical Review 162

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web. Union Square Ventures The next morning I got to spend time with Brad Burnham , partner at Union Square Ventures talking about their investment strategy and insights about web-based businesses.

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

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.

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Other advisors provided marketing with industry-specific advice in our initial vertical markets (computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, finite element analysis, and petroleum engineering). Some of these advisors from the academic community would work with our of VP of Engineering and help us solve specific technical problems.

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Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

Chainalysis is the clear market leader in their vertical and sits at the nexus between crypto exchanges, financial institutions, regulatory bodies, and law enforcement agencies. While there’s been a number of highly publicized examples including their role in helping creditors of Mt.

Web 48

Web Silicon Valley Technical Review Artificial Inteligence 48

Austin Startup

JUNE 27, 2017

Looking for Funds in All the Right Places: The Definitive Guide to Austin Capital By David Altounian and Stephen Straus OVERVIEW For entrepreneurs: We’ve compiled a definitive list of sources of capital in Austin to help focus your fundraising efforts. We’ve compiled a definitive list of sources of startup capital in Austin.

Venture Capital 54

Venture Capital Austin Texas Private Equity 54

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. In a startup success isn’t about just execution, it’s how well we could take our original hypothesis and learn, discover , iterate and execute. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious.

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Now with a new infusion of $8 million dollars of venture capital, SuperMac had been resurrected from the dead and was attempting to restart. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Yet two smart VC firms, Sigma and Matrix Partners, realized that somewhere in this mess there was value. Order Here. Now In Print!

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 146

thebarefootvc

AUGUST 13, 2013

These vertical solutions would focus on specific pain pain points in the enterprise, such as logistics or customer relationship management. Entrepreneurship Startups Technology Uncategorized Venture Capital cloud computing enterprise IBM internet Salesforce SAP software startups'

Advisory Board 70

Advisory Board Cloud Venture Capital Vertical 70

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 23, 2020

This year has seen historic growth for startups in telehealth. Digital health, defined as the use of technologies to drive improvements in the design of medical products and the delivery of health care services, shows no sign of slowing. The startup has since closed $110 million of Series D funding. Mental health.

Startup 93

Startup Venture Capital Canada Vertical 93

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. In either type of startup you want to put in place processes in place to reduce risk.

Vertical 128

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 128

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.)

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

Consider what followed since November: New foundational models, more efficient ways of training models etc An explosion of open source models, the rise of HuggingFace Breakthrough research across voice, video, text, multi modality, etc Billions of dollars invested in thousands of startups at the application layer of generative AI.

Generative AI 78

Generative AI ChatGPT Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 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. Thanks to CJ Xia, Boster Biological Technology ! #14-

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Technical Review Vertical Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. Now In Print!

Customer Development 124

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 124

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.

Cofounder 219

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. It took lots of trial and error, learning by experience and resilience through multiple failures.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

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?

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

I love being in VC because I get the opportunity to learn about new technologies and industries every day. Each month, we pick an up-and-coming vertical or theme and do a deep dive (with the help of Mattermark – portfolio plug). And being thesis-driven makes us more efficient when filtering through all the startups we see.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Portfolio Vertical Technical Review 60

VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

Today’s e-consumers are reaping the benefits of eCommerce’s cornerstone: Superior technological innovation. Practically impossible for a startup. That marketing, however, is dependent on capital, and that capital means Venture Capital. It would be competing against Coca Cola and Pepsi.

eCommerce 94

eCommerce Open Source SEM Technical Review 94

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.

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Version One Ventures

JULY 21, 2020

Technology changes. The startup market evolves, and so do we as VCs. No matter the vertical, geography, business model, macro or micro trends, entrepreneurs form the nucleus of a generational company. Over the past few months, we’ve reflected on our journey over the past decade, who we are and what we invest in.

Founder 213

Founder Vertical Differentiation Portfolio 213

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.)

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

In last week’s The Economist, the gist of the lead story is that entertainment – an industry that has been associated with flailing newspaper subscriptions and, relatedly, a sector struggling given the rise of technology – is in fact, the “new oil” for the contemporary epoch.

Vertical 113

Vertical Artificial Inteligence Distribution IPO 113

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. This post was mentioned on Twitter by Brendan McManus, [Startup Digest]. Startup Digest] said: Thanksgiving Day [link] [via @sgblank] [.] Just a reflection on my family and hopes for our children.

Silicon Valley 137

Silicon Valley Turkey United States RSS 137

David Teten

AUGUST 19, 2019

I’ve been a traditional equity VC for 8 years, and I’m now researching new business models in venture capital. RBI normally requires founders to pay back their investors with a fixed percentage of revenue until they have finished providing the investor with a fixed return on capital, which they agree upon in advance.

Revenue 60

Revenue Technical Review Software Review Equity 60

cdixon.org

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

Why you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret. I have a personal diligence rule that when speaking to people at large companies, the facts that they tell you are very useful but their opinions about startup ideas no more valuable than any other smart person’s opinions). Peter Coles. Jon Russell. Jonah Peretti. Lauren Leto.

Stealth 68

Stealth Startup NDA Cofounder 68

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. . When I met my now-wife, I realized that any technology that can find me a spouse is a killer app. See Bessemer Venture Partners’ A comprehensive guide to security for startups.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

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.

Silicon Valley 60

Silicon Valley Venture Capital eCommerce Startup 60

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.)

Customer 195

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

Was this a lost decade for venture capital? Both early- and late-stage startup valuations are currently elevated. Or simply put, a small % of VC funds take home a large % of venture return. The chart below illustrates this, with the black vertical line representing the average VC return. Source: AngelList.

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Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Distribution Early Stage 319