I have long argued that BuzzFeed was the most likely to become the first lasting, stand alone large public company of the digital media era.
Yes, a company called BuzzFeed could be this era’s answer to the Washington Post or CNN. And recent news reports show that investors agree: BuzzFeed is rumored to be prepping for an IPO.
But even I didn’t see that one coming back in 2012, when I interviewed CEO Jonah Peretti about his past viral sensations, his recent past building Huffington Post, and his current and future at BuzzFeed.
Given all BuzzFeed has accomplished since this interview, some of the questions are almost quaint– like my asking whether there would ever be a White House Correspondent from BuzzFeed. More stunning was Peretti’s ans...
Most startup Founders never get rich — and it's 100% our own fault.
I'm not talking about not getting rich because our startup failed — that one is obvious. I'm talking about having a startup that actually worked and still not getting rich. And when I say "rich" I don't mean "Powerball Rich" I'm talking in most cases, making any money at all. As a whole, we tend to suck at making money for ourselves.
The reason for this is that the startup ethos is riddled with fallacies about how we should approach profit and wealth. We've constructed a narrative that glorifies sacrifice and risk while somehow completely overlooking common sense and profit.
Founders need a reality check. We need to remind ourselves that treading down the most dangerous pat...
Some investors may be considered "angels" — but they are no saints!
That's why when it comes to getting "bailed out" by future investors, whether it be compensating us personally for money we've lost or helping to get our startup out of debt, we're entirely on our own. We've helped thousands of Founders raise capital, and invariably, many ask whether new investors would be willing to cover their previous losses or investments. The short answer is "absolutely not." But the longer answer may help you understand exactly why.
The most common debts Founders ask about are personal debt they've created in financing the company or forgone compensation. The question often looks like, "I've put in $100,000 of my own m...
The hard thing about failure is putting it into perspective. Startups Fail. All the time.
I speak to Founders and co-founders all the time who are going through the most brutal moments of their professional careers. For them, it feels like an eternity, and more importantly, it feels like a permanent tombstone for the rest of their career.
For me, it's the millionth time I've seen the same story play out. A Founder gets fired up about a new venture and building something amazing, it goes well for a while, then out of nowhere it tanks, and the Founder feels like it's the end of the world. Except I've been doing this for 30 years, and I've had plenty of these moments myself.
What matters in these moments is getting some perspective on how fleetin...
Venture-funded startups grow way beyond their means because they have to.
Time and time again we get asked by (typically bootstrapped) Founders about why in the hell venture-funded startups love that so-called "fake growth."
You've seen this before, when a new startup raises gobs of venture capital, hires hundreds of new people, burns through tens of millions of dollars (or more!), and then later on has to crash and burn the whole thing because it never actually made any money.
From the outside, it seems insane. What Founders don't realize is that this whole "fake growth strategy" isn't just some bizarre misstep - it's an actual playbook. We look at stories like WeWork and ask "How could anyone let that happen?" Well, it turns out, there's...
There's a reason the only way to get the "Founder" job title is to start the company — because there's no way to hire for it otherwise.
When I was running my first company, I was in my mid-20s with a hilarious lack of experience. The company was growing quickly, and we went from "a few people in a room" to "a few hundred people in a room," and soon my lack of experience (and pimples) was becoming very evident.
I was scared, so I set out to find a replacement for me, someone who could not only bring more experience but more confidence to the staff in executive leadership. We found an "old guy" who, at the time, I think was maybe 38, probably less, but he had some gray hair and was orders of magnitude more mature than the lot of us.
Building solid financial statements starts with digging through all of the financial transactions in all of our accounts. In our example, we'll do this with a spreadsheet but you can use your accounting software to comb through your financial records and do the same thing.
Once you've done a little bit of startup accounting you'll realize that keeping good financial records is just about process. You don't need complicated accounting software or a finance background, just a dead simple accounting system you can repeat monthly.
In our own business at Startups.com, we've managed the company's financial position for over a decade using the same basic accounting methods for an 8-figure growing company. We use a basic fi...
TL;DR: "Oh Sh*t!! My competitor just raised a bunch of funding to do exactly what we're doing. We're done for, right? How can we possibly compete with someone who now has the resources to do all of the things we wished we could do?"
Yes, a competitor just raised some funding. No, it probably doesn't matter.
"Wait, what? How could my competitor raising money be anything but my own personal Armageddon?"
Well, it turns out that when the pixie dust settles after those big announcements, our competitors often have a whole new bag of problems to deal with that we don't. We need to look past the upside of that new capital to understand how most funded startups actually sink themselves with an anchor of funding.
The very first t...
Ben Horowitz recently published his book The Hard Things about Hard Things. It’s no exaggeration to say I love it. As a third-time founder having experienced many of the challenges firsthand, I wish that book had been written 15 years ago, when I was trying to build my first company (although I’m not sure I would have read it back then; learning seems to be easier in hindsight). One of the great things about Ben’s book is that it focuses on sharing the hard lessons when it’s not all smooth sailing.
Inspired by this, I thought I would add some of the lessons from Tradeshift. Just like Opsware, Tradeshift is a company in wartime, as are most B2B companies try- ing to break into highly entrenched software markets controlled by incumbents with ...
Forget Snapchat. One of the most speculated about potential IPOs in Silicon Valley this year is file sharing and storage company Dropbox.
Dropbox was one of the earliest Valley unicorns to seem to defy any logic in valuations, and at its last round was valued at $10 billion making it one of a handful of so-called “deca-corns.” At one time, it and Airbnb made up some 95% of the value of Y-Combinator’s entire portfolio. And it was backed early on by top venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, on their way to raising some $600 million in capital. Its office was so lavish it reportedly spent up to $40 million a year just on employee perks. Its lobby sported a $100,000 statue of a Panda.
Yes, for a while, Dropbox and its co-founder and CEO Drew H...