Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 22, 2011

Feature, not a company. Whether something is a feature or a company is clearly subjective. And sometimes features (say, Twitter) turn into companies. At minute eight I spoke about group messaging companies as “features, not companies.&# What do I think now? It has always stood out in my mind.

Company 295

Company Companies Gogii Google 295

socalTECH

JULY 10, 2019

The company has raised $1.9M We spoke with CEO and co-founder Spencer Price to learn more about the company. Spencer Price: Halla is the only software company to dynamically profile human tastes so we can help people make better choices. Spencer Price: That's a fair question. What is Halla?

Pricing 113

Pricing Startup North Hollywood Platform 113

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2018

The most important advice I could give you before you set out in fund raising mode is to understand that fund-raising a sales & marketing process and needs to be managed. Somehow many first-time founders equate “sales” with something that is beneath them. an investment in your company. If in high school you got a 3.6

Venture Capital 332

Venture Capital Funding Startup Sales 332

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 27, 2021

Customers go there to check on the details of your offerings and verify that you are not a scam, investors look there to check out your management and sales approach, and suppliers expect to find contact information. Websites do take time to get done right. Finalizing the web site validates your product plan and sales strategy.

Web 139

Web Startup Sites Design 139

socalTECH

MAY 30, 2019

Richards--a serial entrepreneur who has been involved in a number of technology companies here, including NTI Group (sold to Blackboard), Internships.com, MP3.com, Now we have a thousand large companies into it, and if you name a big company, they're a customers of ours, from Starbucks to NASA.

Content 193

Content Social Network Coach Help 193

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 14, 2017

I read commentary or Twitter or blogs and realize that there are also strongly held convictions that there are these evil VCs who do terrible things to mostly altruistic founders. In fact, as one Twitter commenter observed to what do board do, “Often, not much.” The administrative work we actually do at board meetings?

Startup 217

Startup Technical Review Equity Report 217

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 30, 2014

What is a founder to do? And not a point-of-view I particularly believe in. So what IS one to do? When I meet other VCs I’m constantly asking how they decide which investments to make, when to pass, when to do follow-on rounds, when to sell a company vs. when to go long, etc. Triangulate.

Startup 407

Startup Framework CTO Coach Sales 407

socalTECH

MAY 7, 2018

How do you get top tier venture capitalists interested in your startup? Yan tells us how the company's revenues, growth, and profits--even in the early days--drove $21M in funding from Sequoia for the company. How did the company start? I realized that was because the industry just doesn't have any other way to do this.

Startup 173

Startup Pricing Marketing Entrepreneur 173

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 18, 2021

Some startups do nothing to prepare for the due diligence process, assuming the people and business plan documents will speak for themselves. I believe that proactive preparation for due diligence is a bigger job than the work for investor meetings, because your whole team is involved, not just you as the CEO. Don’t surprise the team.

Technical Review 152

Technical Review Startup Satisfaction Summary 152

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 14, 2012

…” I’ll write soon on my views of why I believe Instagram took off as a social network and what I think comes next. What I want to talk about today is one of the insider baseball discussions of our industry this past week: The odd fact of the $500 million financing round completed just before the company sold for a B.

Venture Capital 316

Venture Capital Pricing Social Network Acquisition 316

socalTECH

MAY 2, 2011

Los Angeles-based SaveFans (www.savefans.com) recently raised some funding for its take on secondary ticketing, so we thought we'd speak with founder Wes Brodsky about the company and where it's going. We are an offer-based platform that allows users to negotiate the price they buy and sell tickets for, on the secondary market.

Ticketmaster 253

Ticketmaster Pricing Sales Activity 253

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 7, 2014

I spend a lot of time with startups and thus hear many companies talk about their approach to sales and their interactions with customers. Given customers & sales are the lifeblood of any organization you’d imagine everybody would respect their customers. Contrast that with a VC conversation I had.

Customer 341

Customer Custom Venture Capital Software Review 341

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 6, 2023

Many entrepreneurs are so enamored with their product vision that they believe their own hype and are convinced that the market for their solution is so huge that no one will ask them for independent market research data. Peruse company reports from your business domain.

Statistics 120

Statistics Research Report Newsletter 120

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 26, 2012

” The post talked about how to find the lowest acceptable price & terms in a deal through testing. In the post I made clear that I believe that all negotiations should seek to find fair deals where both parties can feel good about the outcomes. Here’s what a big company negotiation looks like: 1.

Development Team Review 293

Development Team Review Software Review Pricing Startup 293

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

2 preamble issues having read the comments on TC today: 1: I know that the prices of startup companies is much great in Silicon Valley than in smaller towns / less tech focused areas in the US and the US prices higher than many foreign markets. You can be pissed off, but I don’t set prices. They are pretty illiquid.

Startup 336

Startup Pricing Technical Review Marketing 336

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2015

when a technology startup, its investors or the market believe in robust growth rates writ large. “the ecommerce company gained fauxmentum by raising artificially high amounts of venture capital and spent lavishly on customer acquisition despite long payback periods and questionable LTV” __. __. faux·men·tum.

Startup 150

Startup Marketing Customer Custom 150

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 20, 2014

I was an early and tireless advocate for the growth of the Internet video ecosystem and as virtually every article I wrote made clear I believe the 800-pound-gorilla is YouTube and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The Internet works best on Deflationary Economics. So Why MiTú? Indeed we are already seeing that online.

Invest 291

Invest Content Media Networking 291

socalTECH

NOVEMBER 6, 2020

Our interview this morning is with Brad Stewart , the new CEO of Los Angeles-based Fair (www.fair.com), backed by Softbank, which has been in the midst of reinventing the company after some setbacks in its initial efforts to create a subscription-based model for automobiles. Brad Stewart: The company had two previous lives.

Startup 124

Startup Pricing Platform Study 124

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 16, 2009

Nearly all of the mistakes I made at my first company I fixed by the time of my second company. This is the only mistake I repeated twice and it is a mistake that I see many, many companies make. When you start your company the very first question you need to ask yourself is which kind of customers do you want to serve.

Startup 389

Startup Customer Custom Resource 389

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 19, 2011

They’re essential in helping us get our jobs done because they specialize in something we do not. They do a routine task over-and-over again all year long that we do only periodically. We had the final terms of our agreement fairly well boxed in within a range of about 5-7% on price and within 30 days on move-in date.

Venture Capital 319

Venture Capital Pricing Startup Outsource 319

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2010

I pointed to several Economist articles I had read that mapped historical prices of real estate for 400 years and how on average property values grow at no more 1.5% above inflation yet in many markets in the US & Europe prices were rising at 10-25% per year. And it’s driving up prices beyond their inherent value.

Invest 299

Invest Angel Technical Review Venture Capital 299

Frank Addante

APRIL 9, 2013

Not at all, a direct sales force is the most expensive channel to take a product to market. To sell enterprise software, sales employees are trained to sell through channels. They do everything possible to enable the channel. After that, they do everything possible to grow and support that channel.

Advertising 59

Advertising Sales Software Platform 59

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 6, 2010

But I thought I should do a quick post on the topic. We set our sites on our IPO price and then worked back to our current valuation and showed potential employees what we thought they could earn (with all legal caveats) if the company was successful. The stupid thing is we sort of believed it ourselves.

Startup 294

Startup Sales Venture Capital Slides 294

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

I had a picture in the office of my first company with the logo above and the capital letters JFDI. (In In case it’s not obvious it’s a play on the Nike slogan, “Just Do It.&# ) I believe that being successful as an entrepreneur requires you to get lots of things done. Entrepreneurs have a way of doing that.

Entrepreneur 414

Entrepreneur Technical Review Slides CTO Coach 414

socalTECH

JUNE 9, 2010

Last week, Los Angeles-based HauteLook (www.hautelook.com), an online private sales site, scored a major round of funding--raising $31M from Insight Venture Partners. Adam Bernhard: We're a platform that does flash sales. Adam, thanks for the time. We work on behalf of brands, as a web site that has a membership base of over 2.5

Sales 224

Sales Email Startup Sample 224

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 16, 2013

The company with no revenue and a $150k burn rate that raised $2.5 Isn’t that what mere mortal businesses are supposed to do? After all, if nobody external was willing to fund you now without the accelerated scaling why would they do so in a year? You would figure out how to monetize later. I have said so for years.

Venture Capital 412

Venture Capital Startup Funding Snapchat 412

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

There has always been tension between CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies and the retailers who sell their products to consumers. If a consumer will pay a fixed price for a product or service then the battle over who gets the margin in any sale is between the person who merchandises a product and the person who manufactures it.

Product 296

Product Course Customer Custom 296

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 14, 2020

Many entrepreneurs are so enamored with their product vision that they believe their own hype, and are convinced that the market for their solution is so huge that no one will ask them for independent market research data. Peruse company reports from your business domain.

Marketing 157

Marketing Statistics Research Report 157

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 1, 2016

Those who know how to lead are those who have an easier time doing all the things that feel like such a struggle. So spending time thinking about what your leadership style is, whether it’s effective and what you could do to improve it can yield dividends. We can be blunt but we believe that builds healthier relationships.

Startup 150

Startup Coach Course Invest 150

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 4, 2010

When new companies enter the market they really have no chance to initially unseat the incumbents because the performance gap is too large and the costs / time of catching up too unachievable. In 1999-2000 they weren’t doing enterprise-wide installations at Merrill Lynch, Dell and Cisco. Enter Salesforce.com. So what did happen?

Startup 376

Startup Framework Marketing Customer 376

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 15, 2019

Customers go there to check on the details of your offerings and verify that you are not a scam, investors look there to check out your management and sales approach, and suppliers expect to find contact information. Websites do take time to get done right. Finalizing the web site validates your product plan and sales strategy.

Web 76

Web Startup Sites Design 76

Tech.Co

JUNE 28, 2021

The company mission statement is, of course, a way to seize attention externally, and focus team members on the end destination. ” Remember when every new tech company seemed to promise a revolution in the way of doing things? million into its coffers — so it must be doing something right.

Startup 104

Startup Ideas Venture Capital Course 104

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I’m not against MBA’s (I have one myself from University of Chicago and my lovely wife was graduated from Wharton – she loves to remind me that they usually score higher in the rankings than we do). Not hard-core, just the stuff you’d do if you were in jr. MBA fine, but not required. So back to MBAs.

Startup 337

Startup Venture Capital Study Course 337

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 25, 2013

The top 2% do not drive 98% of the returns. So if you take 6 very strong performing firms of $250 million and assume they do 5x each that is $1.25 You invest across many funds just as VCs invest across many companies. But the top 25% do consistently beat the alternatives. But VC is like congress. The second is not.

Venture Capital 374

Venture Capital Entrepreneur Invest Funding 374

Eric Greenspan

JULY 3, 2012

Make It Work was an amazing company. With over 38,000 cult-like testimonials, one cannot dispute the company delivered a valuable service in a way like no other company has come close. In doing so, I will assume all of the personally guaranteed loans and lines granted to the company. I was wrong.

Capital 234

Capital Pricing Press Customer 234

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 4, 2014

Yesterday I wrote a post about “ the politics of startups ” in which I asserted that all companies have politics, which in its purest sense is just about understanding human psychology. One wants to build a company that will be around in 10 years – financial outcome be damned! Those are the easy cases.

Startup 340

Startup Technical Review Course Press 340

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

This is an updated post from my ongoing series on Startup Advice that I learned from founding two companies. . I believe that it is part of the DNA of an entrepreneur – being so competitive that you’re practically sick when you lose. 15 companies North of $1 billion exit. I HATE LOSING. I hate it. I lose sleep.

Outsource Development 333

Outsource Development Software Review Technical Review News 333