Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

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Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 19, 2020

I've known Brian Chesky, Co-Founder, CEO and Head of Community at Airbnb for a long time. He also has strongly held ideas about structuring a company to institutionalize these intentions to make sure the next leader, future employees, and the next board will be true to that philosophy. This is when it matters most.

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Management Cofounder China IPO 122

crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 14, 2012

Some Quick Sage Advice for Young Employees Early in Their Careers – [link]. Startups Cannot Afford to Have Indispensable Employees (and not for the reason you think) | Rand’s Blog – [link]. Inside the IPO pipeline: It’s all B2B, all of the time | GeekWire – [link].

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Social Media Small Business Design Media 100

www.entrepreneur.com

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

Run & Grow Run and Grow Your Business Home Human Resources Leadership Innovation Growth Strategies Business Management Travel Innovation Play Video Docstocs Jason Nazar on Fostering Innovation (Video). Product Reviews Mindjet Connect Helps Small Businesses Visualize and Manage Projects. What is Sweat Equity Worth? July 31, 2007 |.

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Sweat Equity Equity Fractional CTO CTO 55

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 14, 2014

Most entrepreneurs struggle with many startup Founders dilemmas in building their business, and these key dilemmas are probably the biggest source of pain and failure for the entrepreneur lifestyle. Should you start a company solo or find co-Founders to help you? The co-Founder relationship dilemma.

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Hockey Stick Cofounder Entrepreneur Liquidity Event 268

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. So much for timing. October 13, 2008 6:47 PM Luke G said.

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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 19, 2017

Most entrepreneurs struggle with many startup founders dilemmas in building their business, and these key dilemmas are probably the biggest source of pain and failure for the entrepreneur lifestyle. Should you start a company solo or find co-founders to help you? The co-founder relationship dilemma.

Hockey Stick 144

Hockey Stick Cofounder Entrepreneur Liquidity Event 144

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 19, 2013

Most entrepreneurs struggle with many startup Founders dilemmas in building their business, and these key dilemmas are probably the biggest source of pain and failure for the entrepreneur lifestyle. Should you start a company solo or find co-Founders to help you? The co-Founder relationship dilemma.

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Founder Hockey Stick Cofounder Liquidity Event 245

mashable.com

OCTOBER 16, 2010

All of this is according to Paul Graham, co-founder of the early-stage investment fund Ycombinator. The result is that many venture capital firms are now making smaller angel investments in an attempt to get close with startup founders that are likely to raise bigger funding rounds later on.

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Angel Investor Venture Capital Social Media Technical Review 84

Hunter Walker

AUGUST 26, 2022

Hunter Walk: Ok, so we first met when you were leading comms at enterprise software company Box, a startup you joined when they were still pretty early and stayed at until post-IPO. I had gone to high school with the founders in the Seattle area, and we had recently reconnected. First, congrats! Enter Box. They gave me a shot.

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mashable.com

OCTOBER 16, 2010

All of this is according to Paul Graham, co-founder of the early-stage investment fund Ycombinator. The result is that many venture capital firms are now making smaller angel investments in an attempt to get close with startup founders that are likely to raise bigger funding rounds later on.

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Angel Investor Venture Capital Social Media Technical Review 83

Altgate

JUNE 25, 2012

Re-posted from post co-authored with Prof. —————– Dead equity — equity held by employees and founders no longer working at the company — is a large and growing problem. Facebook’s IPO minted many millionaires and even billionaires. Noam Wasserman on Inc.

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Equity Vesting Cap Table Technical Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

To shed some light, I talked with kaChing , a destination that enables individual investors to find outstanding money managers to manage their money. kaChing launched a virtual portfolio management game on Facebook in January 2008 and a similar version shortly thereafter on kaChing.com.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

A Crowded Space

OCTOBER 3, 2018

A huge congratulations to the entire Upwork team on a successful IPO! Very shortly after I joined, Greg Gretsch (now my partner at Jackson Square Ventures) co-led oDesk’s Series A along with Venky Ganesan (partner at Menlo Ventures and lead investor in Rev.com). I was fortunate enough to be on the founding team of oDesk (now Upwork).

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

Why do these founders get to stay around? Because the balance of power has dramatically shifted from investors to founders. — Unremarked and unheralded, the balance of power between startup CEOs and their investors has radically changed: IPOs/M&A without a profit (or at times revenue) have become the norm.

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Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 281

www.geekwire.com

JULY 10, 2012

Manager, Test Engineering (Performance Team). The company is hiring 300 employees in 2012, particularly software engineers with talent in key areas such as interactive analytics, mobile applications, internet scale distributed systems, high performance graphics, user experience and human oriented design. Co-founder, National Editor.

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Venture Capital Seattle Cofounder Software Engineering 42

Steve Blank

MARCH 9, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Joining me in SiriusXM’s studio in New York were: Drew Silverstein , co-founder and CEO of the music technology venture Amper Music. We didn’t IPO it.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2010

This episode of This Week in Venture Capital featured Michael Montgomery, president of Montgomery & Co. If you don’t know Montgomery & Co it is one of the premier technology & media focused investment banks in the country (and as Michael corrected me they also have a strong Healthcare / Med tech practice).

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

When creating a new market, expect to spend as long as two years before you manage to get traction with early customers, but enjoy the utter lack of competition. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief. What kind of market are you in? We dont just abandon the vision of the company at every turn.

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 18, 2012

You’d imagine that every founder was getting rich. Actually, positive outcomes for founders are quite rare. As a startup founder you rarely have much money in your bank accounts. Think about it – most entrepreneurs who manage to raise seed money or venture capital usually raise enough money for 12-18 months maximum.

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Monaco Cofounder Chicago Mexico 420

Eric Friedman

DECEMBER 30, 2020

With the stock price off since IPO and the need to “rollup” enterprise chat + video MSFT takes a swing at solving a huge b2b problem with a startup friendly platform. Bullish in this space since 2015 I see the air cover in place for institutions and private wealth managers to now take the plunge. No, but Salesforce bought slack.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

In the case of C3, that was to run payroll for 87,000 employees, who were presumably receiving payroll before the project began. Both Scrum and XP had a role which you could happily call by the modern title "Product Manager". Thats why I prefer to think of them as two co-equals: the problem team and the solution team.

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Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

The same has been true of an unfortunate number of startups, they manage to generate a lot of hype, raise a lot of money, and sometimes make some of their investors, employees, or founders rich. Ive been there: is it me or my cofounder thats crazy? Yet, I think this definition is too important to leave out.

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Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 25, 2018

My first day at Bazaarvoice was just a few weeks later, on May 2, 2005, and we built a company from inception to IPO on around $12m of capital use (out of the $24m we raised) in 7 years, creating over a thousand jobs and impacting clients all over the world?—?starting Still in business today and run by my co-founder.

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Agile VC

JUNE 17, 2015

My first startup job was as an early employee at PayPal, where I took a job at the end of ‘1999 and started a few months later in 2000. I started off as a product manager and while I never actually slept over at the office, there were frequently late nights. When we started LinkedIn, it was a similar situation.

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Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 188

View from Seed

JANUARY 24, 2018

The concept our Guilds is simple: We want to bring together small groups of Product and Go-to-Market experts to lend their time to support our portfolio company founders and key operators. Pierre Valade, Co-Founder of Sunrise & Mobile Designer at Microsoft. Brian Balfour, Founder & CEO of Reforge. Product Guild.

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Operations Cofounder Technical Review Angel Investor 176

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?"

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I have personally sold many copies of his book, and continue to recommend it as one of the most important books a startup founder can read. I used to give copies of Four Steps out to my employees, in the hopes that it would instantly indoctrinate them into the methodology of Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

Genuine VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

That situation certainly can work very well early on in a company’s life-cycle when there are a dozen or less employees. Of course with technology-enabled startups, the goal s of a company are not to add employees. Perhaps it can work even in larger organizations in which the nature of the work is inherently distributed by nature.

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Reid Hoffman

OCTOBER 5, 2020

.” SPACs, which are sometimes referred to as blank check companies, are entities that go public and raise money from investors so that the IPO proceeds can be used to invest in and acquire companies. The reason I think SPACs are hot right now is the lack of innovation in the IPO process. In 2014, SPACs raised $1.8

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Venture Capital IPO Cofounder Institutional Investors 28

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

Over breakfast he got me up to date on his life since school (two non-CEO roles in startups,) but he wanted to talk about his third startup – the one he and two co-founders had started. Now the organization needs to put in place culture, training, product management, processes and procedures, (i.e.

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www.mint.com

MARCH 9, 2010

Mint is the best way to manage your money. This is how you can determine if the company management is optimistic (good), delusional (sometimes good, often necessary), or just plain pathological liars (always bad). But you should beware of boards that are only the founders and their family and friends. Live your life.

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Software Review Startup Post-Money Valuation Technical Review 68

Scott Edward Walker

FEBRUARY 3, 2012

Securities and Exchange Commission , we again present Mark Zuckerberg , co-founder of Facebook and indeed an amazing, inspirational entrepreneur. This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic.

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Entrepreneur Securities and Exchange Commission IPO Engineer 65

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2011

I hope that you can join us Monday night, April 4, midtown NYC, at a panel on “Innovation in Private Company Liquidity-Online Merger Markets, Social Media, Secondary Markets, Non-US Markets, Private Equity, and the Disappearing IPO” The program is sponsored by the HBS Club of New York and the HBS Angels of NY.

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Private Equity Merger IPO Equity 68

Hunter Walker

MARCH 8, 2014

There aren’t yet four layers of management between you and the founders. The Early Team Still There and They’ll Be Your Tribe for Years : The founders and early team are still in place because there hasn’t been a liquidity event and the work is still exciting for them.

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Liquidity Event Early Stage Seed Stage Startup 134

Scalable Startup

DECEMBER 14, 2012

Raising Money – you are constantly doing this, preparing for this and thinking about this, whether it’s pre-seed, seed funding, debt, revenue, partnerships, IPO or other. This piece is what often kills an otherwise great business, which justifys the case for less is more when it comes to employees and infrastructure.

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View from Seed

JUNE 17, 2015

My first startup job was as an early employee at PayPal, where I took a job at the end of ‘1999 and started a few months later in 2000. I started off as a product manager and while I never actually slept over at the office, there were frequently late nights. When we started LinkedIn , it was a similar situation.

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Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 120