Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

Use metrics to measure results of marketing initiatives. Great team members may take more time to find, and cost you stock options, but a qualified and highly motivated team that stretches your budget is a good calculated risk. Don’t rely on conservative forecasts to reduce risk. Build your business with minimum outside funding.

Startup 120

Startup Forecast Stock Options Technical Review 120

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

While it’s useful to be able to have a sales forecast and expense budget early on, it’s not something you need until you’ve validated your idea. Later you will want to come back and create a proper sales forecast, cash flow forecast, and expense budget. Circle back and create a more detailed forecast.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 3, 2021

Both of these are paramount to the running of a business, and while they might seem to have some overlap, they look at two distinct metrics. There are a variety of good cash flow rules to follow for any business, such as keeping an eye on specific metrics that have large impacts on cash flow. Metrics and management.

Balance Sheet 81

Balance Sheet Management .Net Metrics 81

David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

This structure allows for alignment on the front end, and real-time flexibility for performance metrics,” says Samira Salman , a family office investor and advisor. . Flexible VCs have created structures based on other company performance metrics than revenues, such as profits or founder salaries. Flexible VC 102: Variations.

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

OnlyOnce

DECEMBER 19, 2012

3.6 Forecasting and Budgeting. 3.10 A Metrics-Driven Approach to Running a Business. 6.7 Taking Stock. (or, “Nothing Interesting Happens in the Office”). 1.3 Setting the Business Direction. 1.4 Strategic Planning, Part I: Turning Concepts Into Strategy. 1.8 The Role of M&A.

Startup 78

Startup Forecast Finance Leadership 78

Up and Running

OCTOBER 30, 2017

Begin by taking stock of yourself and your situation: Why do you want to start a business? Instead, your plan can follow a Lean Planning process that involves creating a pitch , forecasting your key business numbers, outlining key milestones you hope to achieve, and regular progress checks where you review and revise your plan.

Venture Capital 166

Venture Capital Business Plan Limited Liability Company Finance 166

Steve Blank

MARCH 17, 2020

To answer the first question, take stock of your current gross burn rate i.e. how much cash are you spending each month. Next, take a look at your actual revenue each month – not forecast, but real revenue coming in each month. If so, whatever revenue forecast and sales cycle estimates you had are no longer valid.

Burn Rate 436

Burn Rate Startup Valuation Sales Cycle 436

Steve Blank

JUNE 10, 2010

With venture capital came accountability to board members, forecasts, and other people’s agendas. Success for a scalable startup is a three-times (or more) return on the investor’s money – either by a public offering of stock or by selling the company. Irfan started off with 100 such rickshaws in 2007 and have 300,000 today.

Silicon Valley 332

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur United States New York City 332

Tim Keane

JANUARY 12, 2010

  In a bottom up approach, the forecast is built from actual user projections. Term-sheets for preferred stock offerings are designed to protect the investor in case things don’t go as well as planned.   Say I invest $1MM in a company and receive 40% of the stock. This is why a bottom up approach is more credible.

Term Sheet 68

Term Sheet Valuation Dividend Liquidation Preference 68

Austin Startup

APRIL 25, 2017

In order to achieve 20x growth, Snap needs grow both of those metrics 4–5x. And to top it all off, Snap isn’t offering voting rights to public market investors, which should discount the stock price further. To be clear, I can’t forecast the details of how an augmented reality OS should work. Let’s look at each figure.

Valuation 48

Valuation Technical Review Social Network Forecast 48

YoungUpstarts

MAY 28, 2018

Using the time honoured metric of supply/demand, an increased supply would normally expect to result in a lowered demand. So an increased supply of stock results not in lower demand but in a more competitive pricing environment. What does this mean in terms of property prices? That said, the longer-term prospects remain good.

Ireland 145

Ireland Demand Stock Forecast 145

Duct Tape Marketing

JUNE 20, 2023

But there isn't actually a top down roadmap of how to do it with real milestones and metrics and uh, around it. (07:01): If only we could do amazing, you know, supply chain forecasting, right? I mean, you know, if you'd have bought stock in the world, digital transformation in 2015, right? It's just massive wasted effort.

Technical Review 87

Technical Review Silicon Valley Generative AI Arizona 87

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 2, 2013

Avoid using stock images provided by the manufacturer. She specializes in trend forecasting, data analysis and social media strategy. Alessandra is a frequent speaker at conferences on topics such as branding, building online communities and improving metrics by utilizing data.

Search 190

Search Boston Forecast Engineer 190

Hunter Walker

JANUARY 17, 2019

I just didn’t want to use a stock photo of a laptop. If Your Portfolio Model Assumes Outperformance Across Multiple Metrics, I Don’t Believe It: Every VC fundraise has an Excel sheet that forecasts the performance of the fund. This cat has nothing to do with this post.

Portfolio 129

Portfolio Forecast Dilution LP 129

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 7, 2015

Of course, these should never be in a customer pitch, but investors expect an overall strategy with specific budgets, milestones and metrics. This allows them to calculate burn rates, break-even points and forecast the company valuation over time. Specific elements of your marketing and sales plans.

Product 120

Product Intellectual Property Liquidity Event Burn Rate 120

BeyondVC

NOVEMBER 17, 2006

While the Salary.com numbers are strong ( read the S-1 here), they are not close to those metrics. Using a back of the napkin analysis, most companies sell about 20% of their stock to the public, so one could assume that Salary.com is valued at around $200mm pre-money implying a 10x multiple on trailing twelve month revenue.

IPO 78

IPO Investment Bankers Demand Revenue 78

BeyondVC

NOVEMBER 17, 2006

While the Salary.com numbers are strong ( read the S-1 here), they are not close to those metrics. Using a back of the napkin analysis, most companies sell about 20% of their stock to the public, so one could assume that Salary.com is valued at around $200mm pre-money implying a 10x multiple on trailing twelve month revenue.

IPO 60

IPO Investment Bankers Demand Revenue 60

abovethecrowd.com

MAY 20, 2013

There are common stock, common options, and as many as three to five different layers of preferred stock, each with a specific liquidation preference. Anyone can create any number they want (within reason), as there is no one specific formula or metric for such work. 1) Structural Challenges.

Merger 53

Merger Institutional Investors Liquidation Preference Preferred Stock 53

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 23, 2021

Since larger numbers make it difficult, 3PL partners often offer a dashboard where you can monitor: Real-time inventory in-store alongside the orders received and shipped Forecasts about inventory replenishment Sales performance reports of different regions Personalized sales metrics. Maintain inventory. Focus on your landing pages.

eCommerce 110

eCommerce Customer Retention Reputation 110

David Teten

AUGUST 7, 2019

The second strategy is Value Investing , a strategy which “seeks to maximize returns by finding stocks that are undervalued by the market…Investors assess a stock’s intrinsic value…and compare that value with the stock price. LTV / CAC, revenue growth, etc.)

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Valuation Stock NDA 60

Women Entrepreneurs Can

MARCH 18, 2024

In finance, for example, ERPs deliver real-time insights into costs and performance, fine-tuning budgeting and forecasting. In supply chain management, an ERP can be pivotal in optimizing stock levels, reducing warehousing costs, and improving customer satisfaction through timely delivery.

Artificial Inteligence 52

Artificial Inteligence Cloud Agile Operations 52

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

ReadWriteStart

JULY 18, 2011

These people are like shopkeepers trying to stock their shelves with goods they can sell to other people. They want to stock their shelves and they have nothing. Every company has a forecast for how it will get to an arbitrary $100 million in revenue and they all hit it on year five. Think about when LinkedIn went public.

Investment Bankers 153

Investment Bankers Technical Review Cofounder Due Diligence 153

Agile VC

MAY 26, 2011

In another we decended into a debate about our 5 year forecasts (I built the models so fielded most of these questions), and it became clear they probably weren’t the best fit for our Series A round (this group is no longer in the early-stage VC business). It was a slightly funky formula, this was before caps became more widespread.

Term Sheet 178

Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

Up and Running

MAY 28, 2015

We’re looking at our lean business planning is about strategy, tactics, concrete specifics including milestones, metrics, tasks and schedule, and essential numbers to run a business, all of which lead to managing cash flow. That’s the sales forecast, the spending forecast and the cash flow. It is not a document.

Lean 60

Lean Business Plan Video Software Review 60

OnlyOnce

JULY 9, 2013

The book is part of the Startup Revolution series that Brad has been working on for a couple years now, including Do More (Even) Faster , Venture Deals , Startup Communities , and Startup Life (with two more to come, Startup Boards and Startup Metrics). Budgeting in a Context of Uncertainty, Forecast, Early and Often.

Startup 95

Startup Advisory Board Elevator Pitch Forecast 95

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 4, 2015

Stock photo libraries. Pixabay : Every content producer will need stock photography at some point, it’s just the nature of the game. You can also compare your forecasted marketing and advertising budget against the competition. You’ll get heatmaps, scrollmaps, and access to key engagement metrics for your site.

Curation 60

Curation Finder Startup Social Media 60

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 4, 2018

That knowledge gap hampers efforts to staff and stock the stadium appropriately. You can go with our selections or override them—from regression, where we can do forecasting and optimization, to both binary and multiclass classification, where we can predict the probability of outcomes. Slow adoption but soaring interest. The results?

Analytics 131

Analytics Algorithm Artificial Inteligence Campaign 131

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2018

Your historical trading information including financials and a “customer file” which shows the history of your transactions so that investors can run “cohort” analyses Customer reference, personal references, key team members, compensation, cap table, stock option plan, etc.

Cap Table 336

Cap Table Due Diligence Forecast Churn Rate 336

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2020

People, not just metrics. Brian Chesky : And also humans are not good at forecasting or creating a mental model around something that's never happened before. And what I mean by that is, almost every metric, every graph, every number, is a person. Eric Ries : Metrics are people too. Brian Chesky : Metrics are people.

Silicon Valley 60

Silicon Valley Hosting Cofounder Employee 60

Occam's Razor

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

No, no, not the silly reports that show mostly useless metrics like Average Time on Site and Average Pages Per Visitors ( averages stink! ). Index Value Metric. what new products you could sell / stock / invent!). Index Value Metric. I am telling you people are going to love you for being this awesome. Top Landing Pages.

Web 140

Web Analytics eCommerce Campaign 140

ConversionXL

APRIL 12, 2017

Jared Spool: Is Design Metrically Opposed? Useless measures and silly metrics. Metric: A measure we track (usually over time). A metric should tell you what you will do differently. Combine qualitative usability research and quantitative custom metrics (not metrics that come out of the box). Image Credit.

San Antonio 86

San Antonio Metrics B2B Analytics 86

Cracking the Code

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

He should have invested in Lawson obviously… I could not track back their stock price in 1998 when NetSuite was launched, but since Jan. 2002, the stock price went from $17.5 SaaS business metrics: why are they different? Tuesday, September 02, 2008. Death Sentence for SaaS.or for Lawson? per share to $8.0 ► 2007. (10).

Software Review 48

Software Review Software Technical Review Cloud 48