Today's investors are like the dinosaurs of old, looking up at the sky and saying, "Hey, look at that bright shiny thing cruising right at us..."
Back then it was a meteor that created an extinction-level event for the T-Rex. Today those dinosaurs and their Patagonia vests are watching AI about to make them extinct. What it means to be a VC investor is about to change forever, not because of anything the VCs have done wrong, but because the need for them is quickly evaporating.
For a very long time, building a startup company was insanely expensive and risky. We had to pay for a ton of people, marketing, and infrastructure in hopes that the upfront investment would be worth it. But what happens when those costs plummet? What happens when we...
"Never tell anyone how much money you have. They will only judge you by it or try to take it from you."
That was some of the best advice I've ever gotten from the son of a well-known billionaire after my first startup just started to take off. At the time, I had just started to make some money, and like any poor kid who just came into some cash, I wanted the whole world to know just how well I had done.
So yeah, I was the douchebag posting pictures of my Lamborghini, only social media didn't exist yet, so I guess I was just emailing them, which is way worse! Little did I know at the time how much trouble my personal PR campaign would create for me.
One of the things I first started noticing was that everyone w...
Every startup launches victoriously — it's the rest of the journey that tends to put an end to it.
How many times do we have to see this same movie before we realize how it ends? Tell me if this sounds familiar: A startup launches with great fanfare — big funding, a "transformative" product, and heaps of early praise only to be nearly extinct in just a few years.
Whether it's the "next great media platform," Clubhouse ($4b valuation in 18 months, now almost defunct) or Bird ($2b valuation in just over a year, now worth $40m), we just keep seeing the same thing happen over and over.
What we're missing is the ability to discount those early announcements in favor of waiting for the actual results. We need to be able to see the early victories...
Now that we have most of our assumptions in place, the fun begins. We can start modifying our assumptions that drive sales revenue or fixed costs that will begin to calculate net operating income.
When we forecast an income statement all of these variables work in tandem to support our net operating income formula. Once we line net operating income up with our assumptions, we can move the conversation with potential investors toward what the assumptions are versus debating the whole income statement.
We've already captured most of our indirect costs, capital expenditures, and other costs incurred within our Fixed Items and Assumptions, so most of the work is done already. We can calculate net income by s...
Historically, the bulk of the Valley’s successful companies haven’t been the rocketship consumer successes like Google and Facebook. They’ve been the steady doubles, base-hits, triples, and home runs of the companies who sell software to businesses.
And in a time when Google and Facebook alone control some 80% of all digital ad budgets, that business model of selling something is starting to look better and better.
One of the few entrepreneurs to bridge these two worlds– selling intuitive, easy to use products to companies– and build a multi-billion public company out of it was Aaron Levie. Unlike a Marc Benioff, Levie didn’t come from the enterprise world. He never worked a day at Oracle or IBM. He came up with the idea in college.
It was ...
The moment we take on an investor, we just hired our own boss. There's really no way around it.
It doesn't matter how much equity we give up or how we structure the deal. The moment we owe someone money, the dynamics change. People don't tell us that when we raise money, but if we've ever raised before, it becomes painfully obvious.
Anyone who holds the purse strings to our startup essentially runs our startup. If I own 5% of your company but 100% of the capital, I run the company. I may not own the company, but if I control the blood flow of the company, it lives or dies by my choice.
The vast majority of capital raises place all of the flow of capital and the control provisions that come with that...
Lisa Wang spent four years building SheWorx, a female entrepreneur networking group and community that helped nearly 20,000 women entrepreneurs build and scale their companies. Now, the company has been acquired by the equity crowdfunding platform, Republic, with the goal of expanding their reach even further.
While SheWorx focused primarily on addressing the gender gap in venture capital funding, Republic has traditionally focused on equity crowdfunding. But Lisa tells Startups.com that her thinking about “what it actually takes to close the funding gap” for “diverse entrepreneurs” has changed during her time running SheWorx.
“If you’re going to create any significant change, you can’t keep going down the same old path you’ve always been ...
The old days of having to grow our staff by promoting them into a management pyramid are (thankfully) wasting away. Startups can do way more with fewer people, which means fewer management layers and more empowered staff.
Yet, we're still stuck in the old thinking of "I can only progress if people are reporting to me." It's a dying notion, yet one we struggle with as startup Founders to replace. But we have to figure out how to recast the career paths of our teams if we're going to learn to work in a new world of smaller teams doing 10x more than they used to.
A startup is a company that's in the early stages of development, usually characterized by a small team, fast growth, and limited resources.
Most startups fail, but some create amazing ...
The new mark of a standout Founder is no longer how big they can make their staff — it's how small they can keep it.
Oh, how times have changed, my friends. For hundreds of years, we graded the value and success of a company based on how "big" it had become, and headcount was always the leading indicator. "We've scaled to 1,000 people!" would have been the badge of honor up until the past year, and now it begs the most obvious question, "Why?"
We're entering the Age of Efficiency, where we are rewarded not for a bloated headcount but for a tiny headcount that can produce even greater output. And I've got to say — I couldn't be happier about it because, as startups, this is the dream we've all been waiting for.
Let's star...
We've all been there.
Sitting at our desk as this dark cloud of guilt begins to swirl — yet again — knowing that we're about to choose whether we're going to finish this one critical project at work or make it on time for dinner. Or a soccer game. Or any event that our families are counting on us for.
Do we fail the startup or do we fail the family? We're going to fail someone. Guilt is a constant, the only variable is the source of the guilt.
If this sounds familiar, it's because nearly every startup Founder wrestles with this problem on a daily basis.
We're not just working at jobs — we're trying to survive long enough to even get a paycheck. Everything we have is on the line, including the welfare of the very people we're running hom...