Startup Professionals Musings
AUGUST 9, 2020
I always tell entrepreneurs that two heads are better than one, so the first task in many startups is finding a co-founder or two. You need to find the skills or experience you don’t have in business, technology, or money. So the first question I usually get is what percent of the company or equity is that person worth? Giving a co-founder a salary won’t get you the “fire in the belly” you want.
View from Seed
NOVEMBER 18, 2020
Airbnb’s public S-1 dropped Monday afternoon. One of the most highly anticipated startup IPOs of recent years, we now get a peek inside Airbnb’s business. You can read various articles out there which will give you the cursory facts about Airbnb like their overall revenue or profitability or how their business has faired here in 2020 in the COVID environment.
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deal architect
SEPTEMBER 26, 2020
I was invited to an analyst summit on SAP's Data and Analytics portfolio of products. What a remarkable difference from last year! I had flown to a similar event in Vancouver - first to Seattle, then taken a bus across.
Steve Blank
DECEMBER 11, 2020
We just held our seventeenth session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Joe Felter , Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy. Today’s topic was Organizational Design and Modern War.
Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic
Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in
YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 10, 2020
by Zain Jaffer, serial entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of Zain Ventures. Running a small business can come with a slew of challenges. Among the list: the loss of a major client. In many cases, this scenario is inevitable and difficult to prevent. When it occurs, the consequences can be swift and devastating, wreaking potential havoc on a once steady stream of revenue.
Both Sides of the Table
OCTOBER 26, 2020
Today we’re announcing that my partner Kara Nortman is becoming Co-Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to welcome her to her new role. As with all promotions, the reality is that Kara was already acting as a senior leader at our firm and also in the industry at large. She had all of the skills and traits we sought?
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 31, 2020
Sometimes I like to drop the comment socially that “I knew Bill Gates back when he was a regular guy.” I know that dates me a good bit, but it also shows that I have been hanging around startups for a long time. The honest truth is that I worked directly with him in the early days of Microsoft from my “safe” perch in big IBM, during the startup of the IBM PC.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 24, 2020
The era of stable lifetime jobs for business professionals within a single company are gone. Companies are rightsized quickly now as markets change rapidly, and business professionals are quick to jump to new opportunities for growth and survival, with no ties to special benefits or pension plans. Thus smart business professionals are rapidly becoming the new entrepreneurs.
View from Seed
APRIL 14, 2020
For the last several years, the early stage investing market was driven largely by the F ear O f M issing O ut, AKA FOMO. This led to a number of repercussions that most VC’s have lamented during this time, including higher prices, larger rounds, shoddy due diligence, and many companies raising large sums of venture capital that probably aren’t suited to VC funding.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 24, 2020
As a frequent advisor to new entrepreneurs and startups, I often hear your frustration with being treated differently from other startups by investors, on expectations for valuation , traction, and market size. Of course, it could be your level of experience, or the quality of your team, but the difference is often more related to the lifecycle stage of the market you are trying to enter.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 22, 2020
Every startup founder loves to prompt for questions from investors and potential key team members about their vision, and the huge opportunity that can be had with their disruptive technology. Yet if you are on the other side of the table, there are some other key questions that you need to ask, which will tell you more about the real success prospects for this business.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 17, 2020
Every entrepreneur I know has their favorite excuse for a previous failure – an investor backed out, the economy took a downturn, or a supplier delivered bad quality. These things outside your control do happen, but based on my years of experience as a startup advisor and angel investor, I still see too many strategies leading to failure that are inside the entrepreneur decision realm.
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 18, 2020
As a long-time business executive and adviser to entrepreneurs, I see a definitive shift away from customer trust in traditional business messages, and the executives who deliver them. Today’s digitally distracted consumer is led to trust only things that they see with their own eyes, senses, so they can render their own judgement. They want the raw data versus a polished message.
Startup Professionals Musings
AUGUST 17, 2020
In my experience, consummate entrepreneurs tend come up with more startup ideas than they can ever implement, and some of the ideas may not even make business sense. But how does any entrepreneur know which ideas to implement, and which ones are best left behind? After all, most great breakthroughs, like a computer in every home, seemed like a crazy idea before Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made it happen.
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 30, 2020
In my role as a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I find that most have the technical challenges well understood, but many are a bit short on some basic street smarts , or basic business realities. Thus I often recommend that before you kick off your own business, you join another startup or existing business to see how things really work. Even the best college degree is not a substitute.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 27, 2020
Entrepreneurs inherently understand that they have to be the initial leader of their startup, but often they don’t have the experience or the training to know where their leadership competencies lie, or how to build a leadership team. For new entrepreneurs, leadership development efforts may be more valuable for achieving startup success than business skills development.
Steve Blank
APRIL 16, 2020
Sheltering in place during the Covid-19 pandemic, my coffees with current and ex-students (entrepreneurs, as well as employees early in their careers) have gone virtual. Pre-pandemic these coffees were usually about what startup to join or how to find product/market fit. Though in the last month, even through Zoom I could sense they were struggling with a much weightier problem.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 11, 2020
Many passionate entrepreneurs fight to add more features into their new products and services, assuming that more function will make the solution more appealing to more customers. In reality, more features will more likely make the product confusing and less usable to all. Focus is the art of limiting your scope to the key function that really matters for the majority of customers.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 26, 2020
As an advisor to new hardware entrepreneurs, I often hear the myth that a business plan is no longer required to find an investor, if your idea is good enough. You may have heard that venture capitalists in Silicon Valley no longer read business plans. What you don’t realize is these famous investors only deal with entrepreneurs who sold their last company for a $100M dollars or more.
Startup Professionals Musings
JULY 11, 2020
As a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I’m always surprised by the fact that some never seem to be able to that first startup going, while many others never seem to stop, starting their second or third initiative before the first one is fully hatched. I’m now convinced that serious entrepreneurs relish the startup process more than success. They enjoy the journey more than the destination.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 20, 2020
Entrepreneurs need to be effective team leaders, since no one can transform an idea into a product and a business without some help. Unfortunately many founders I work with as a mentor are experts on the technical side, but have no insight into leading a team. But fortunately, team building is a skill that can be learned and practiced, for those willing to put in some effort.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 28, 2020
In my view, starting a new business has never been easier, and according to reports from the Kauffman Foundation , the numbers are here to show it. The rate of new entrepreneurs increased between 2013 and 2019, from 280 out of 100,000 to 310 out of 100,000 of the adult population. Over 600,000 new businesses were created in the last year, or over one per minute of every day.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 23, 2020
Every entrepreneur and business executive knows that continuous innovation is required to survive, but most struggle with this more than any other challenge they face. They know they need to act proactively, but still are often blindsided by a new competitor coming out of the blue with a future they never imagined. Innovation driven by the next crisis is not leadership.
Startup Professionals Musings
SEPTEMBER 19, 2020
Traditional marketing says you have to “push” your message out to customers, over and over again, to get you remembered. A more effective approach in today’s Internet and interactive culture is to use “pull” technology to bring customers and clients to your story. You pull people in by providing new content with real value on your website at least every few days.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 15, 2020
We just held our fifth session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Joe Felter , Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy. Today’s topic was T he Challenges of Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare.
Startup Professionals Musings
SEPTEMBER 16, 2020
For decades, efforts to satisfy customers have been built around demographics – capitalizing on race, ethnicity, gender, income, and other attributes. Today, in this age of pervasive social media and two-way communication, the focus needs to get beyond demographics into personalities. Customer personalities define customer experience, and sets what they love, and what they hate.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 30, 2020
Every aspiring entrepreneur I know is talking about the fact that there are over 2,000 billionaires in the world today, and how their innovative idea could make them one of the next ones. Most of you prefer to ignore the feedback from analysts that your chances of creating the next unicorn startup may be as low as one in five million. The big question is how you can beat these odds.
Startup Professionals Musings
AUGUST 30, 2020
One of the things I’ve learned in working with aspiring entrepreneurs is that managing and leading a team is a scary venture into the unknown for many people, even if they have worked as a business professional for years. Having worked in my own career on both sides of the fence at various times, I recommend that everyone practice thinking like the boss in every role to prepare.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 25, 2020
The last thing a new entrepreneur wants to think about for a new startup is how it will end. Yet one of the first things a potential equity investor asks about is your exit strategy. The answer you give can make or break your ability to get an investment, so you need to have the right answer ready before anyone asks. Here are three important reasons for the question: Good investment paybacks normally require an exit event.
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 21, 2020
Most entrepreneurs, and members of any small team, naively assume that the key to their success is hard work, dedication, and long hours in the business. In reality, their effectiveness is usually more related to how well they develop their work relationships with peers and business leaders. First they need to decipher correctly every relationship as a workship, friendship, or foe.
Startup Professionals Musings
MARCH 4, 2020
Business success is all about having the best team, yet the average entrepreneur has little prior experience with hiring people and building top-notch teams. It’s no wonder that 45 percent of startups fail in the first five years, and an even smaller percentage ever see a return for their years of effort. Most new entrepreneurs assume their passion will attract and motivate the right team members.
Steve Blank
APRIL 1, 2020
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. It’s been updated with new information about the U.S. Paycheck Protection program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. What cashflow-negative companies must do to survive. We’re in uncharted territory with the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s increasingly looking grim.
View from Seed
JULY 8, 2020
Today I’m excited to announce the relaunch of our most popular resource ever: board meeting deck templates for seed-stage startups, now in conjunction with an investor update email template. Download Board Deck Template . Download Investor Update Email Template. Investor Update Email Template and How & When to Use It. We first released a version of the board meeting deck template template back in 2014 and then a revised version a couple of years later.
Startup Professionals Musings
JULY 5, 2020
Too many entrepreneurs I know still believe that that their great idea will carry the startup, and they may even minimize their own value, especially if they have introvert tendencies. Yet most investors agree that the “idea” is worth nothing alone, and it’s the entrepreneur execution that counts. That means that selling yourself is more important than selling your idea.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 17, 2020
It seems like every entrepreneur I meet these days is quick to proclaim themselves a visionary, expecting that will give more credibility to their startup idea, and improve their odds with investors. In reality, I’m one of the majority of investors who believe that startup success is more about the execution than the idea. Thus, unless the visionary highlights a cofounder who can take the vision and execute, I assume the worst.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 14, 2020
“If we build it, they will come.” I heard it again recently from a technical entrepreneur who should know better than to believe the old “ Field of Dreams ” sports fantasy movie theme in today’s Internet information overload environment. These days, building a new business is all about visibility and marketing, no matter how great or innovative a solution you bring to the table.
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