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. 22-Investment in Employees. Thanks to KOYA !

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Version One Ventures

APRIL 8, 2014

Thus, it should come as no surprise that we are now seeing Venture Capital being disrupted by these forces as well. In his post The Disruption of Venture Capital , Albert Wenger described VC as “the club you had to be invited into.”. Enter Mattermark: where “Big Data Meets Venture Capital”.

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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

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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.

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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 245

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If your don’t have enough employees on the payroll, hire relatives, friends, or part-timers and train them. You’ll never have to do it again.) Everyone should understand your goals, your messages, your demos and your theme and know their role. Trade Show Post Mortem Evaluate the experience. Physical booth: What worked?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today It wasn’t that we somehow had inherited dumb employees. No one had sat the marketing department down and defined what our department Mission (with a capital “M”) was.

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Austin Startup

JUNE 22, 2020

The phrase, “missionaries, not mercenaries,” applies just as equally to early-stage investors as employees. The product is a complex AI service in an industry vertical that is large and growing fast. Didn’t make sense to him that the industry vertical had revenue anywhere near their forecast.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Well yes, I understand that, but this is a startup, what else do you want to do? “I Stay out of startups. Just as an aside, over my career I must have interviewed scores of business school graduates (some from the very fine universities where I now teach) who would say, “I want to do strategy.” I just want to do strategy.”

Silicon Valley 128

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

I’ve paraphrased his speech into the language of a startup. Startups are inherently chaos. Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. Both reminded me why National Service would be a very good idea.) It’s eerily similar.

Silicon Valley 191

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Haystack

JULY 8, 2018

After reflecting on it for a day, I began to understand why — even though this topic has been written about many times, “technology” as a sector and industry now has gone from vertical to horizontal, entirely pervasive across industries, across sectors, across geographies and cultures. Maybe I have a 1-2 year headstart.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs. Stanford Industrial Park was the first technology office park set up to house local and out of state microwave and electronics startups.

Silicon Valley 158

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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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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

I ultimately answered that call, joining Sun Microsystems with a 3-digit employee number. And now am leading a startup of my own ( [link] ) where we’re students of you and Eric Ries’ lean startup principles. invention of electronic warfare, part I and [.] Thanks for connecting the historical dots!

Silicon Valley 210

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

When your employees see that it’s “an anything goes” culture you’ll find unethical behavior occurring that you will regret. If you are a founder of a startup ethics begin with you. Think about the baseball Steroid scandal, Tour de France doping scandal, housing bubble, etc.) Think through if you want to win at any cost.

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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. . Point Nine Capital uses 15Five for continuous employee feedback. See Bessemer Venture Partners’ A comprehensive guide to security for startups. 2) Market .

Technical Review 78

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Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

This post is written with B2B startups in mind, but should be generally applicable. For startup founders, it’s never too early to start thinking about putting together a target market advisory board. And founding teams with limited operational backgrounds in their vertical or domain will create doubt. (An

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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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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Things Change In 1956 Hewlett Packard (HP) was a 17-year old company with $20 million in test equipment sales with 900 employees. I’ll show you the memo in a second. But first some background.) It was still a year away from its IPO. Its latest product was an oscilloscope, the HP 150a.

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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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This is going to be BIG.

JULY 26, 2011

This basically makes them completely unusable as the first marketing employee of a startup--which would be a terrific job for an up and coming marketer. This is a startup's first Director of Marketing and there are a ton of openings in this area.

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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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Hearpreneur

FEBRUARY 19, 2023

We will see startups from less-developed countries being given a chance to be more competitive and claim their spot on the international business map. Even more, advances in data analytics are giving startups the ability to gain valuable insights into customer trends that can be used to develop more successful strategies for growth.

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Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Entrepreneur Global 111

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 10, 2010

I guess it may be impractical for Twitter to acquire Seesmic given it has raised considerable amounts of venture capital (reportedly $12 million) but the broader point for me is that I always believed Twitter should control the client versions of its product. Think about the creative tension.

Acquisition 287

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

But in a startup, it is very important to be surrounded by efficient people. PS1- I run a small software startup in Brazil and just found out about Customer Development and your blog (I’ve been reading and listening to everything I can get my hands on online, like Venturehacks and Ries’ blog). 45 is efficient.

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Austin Startup

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Focus on finding good-neighbor funding sources that add value by helping your company to grow in verticals where the angel/VC has both capital and subject expertise. Let employees go sooner rather than later if they don’t contribute sufficiently or are a bad cultural fit. Did they do what they said they would do?

Dilution 59

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www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

25 Best Startup Failure Post-Mortems of All Time. Update – As a followup, we analyzed all of these startup failure post-mortems to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure. Also worth a read after you review these startup failure post-mortems. Post-Mortem Title : How My Startup Failed.

Software Review 79

Software Review Startup Technical Review Vesting 79

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. We need our own cafeteria so employees don’t have to leave the building. We didn’t have enough conference rooms.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Burnout can turn productive employees into emotional zombies and destroy careers. But it can also force you to hit the pause button and perhaps take a moment to reevaluate your life and your choices. Hitting “burnout” changed the trajectory of both ends of my career in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley 206

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.” What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. My comfort in operating in chaos was something I first recognized when I was working in the Midwest.

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Haystack

MAY 9, 2019

Believe it or not, this will now be the second blog post on this site about a billion-dollar exit for a shaving-related startup. It was just about three years ago when the startup world learned that Unilever had decided to plunk down a cool $1B to buy LA’s Dollar Shave Club. Okay, I’ll give you that. razor market.

Acquisition 121

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

As an early employee I worked all hours of the day, never hesitated to jump on a “ red-eye ” plane to see a customer at the drop of a hat, and did what was necessary to make the company a winner. The founders coming out of the DEC ( Digital Equipment Corporation ) and Intel culture of the 1960’s and ‘70’s.

Entrepreneur 295

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. In a startup the role of Customer Development is to: test the founders hypothesis about the customer problem test if the product concept and minimum feature set solve that problem This is a big idea and worth repeating.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 287

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 16, 2012

This is a company that took $4 million of invested capital to build a company now worth over $4 billion. As we have seen with the recent speed bumps at highfliers like Groupon and Zynga, taking “lean startups” from foundation to creating sustainable, scalable, profitable business models is a very rare and special task. Really hard.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Reply 7thpixel , on June 29, 2009 at 10:23 am Said: My first start up in 1999 I was employee #10 or so and signed up for a Graphic Designer position. Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank (tags: startup) [.] 2 weeks in they had outsourced my job, which lead to an awkward conversation.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great technology company and having the guts to start one. I love Google. I think its one of the smartest companies out there. And it hires very smart people from the best schools. And if you meet their criteria of a “good student”, you ought to go to work there. You just get successful.

Silicon Valley 333

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Here I was, a very junior employee of ESL, a company with its hands in the heart of our Cold War strategy. I continued to give these briefings as a consultant to ESL even after I had joined my first chip startup; Zilog. All You Can Read Without a Library Card It was 1978.

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