Category: growth
October 22, 2018 TIMIA Capital : How alternative financing models are disrupting the start-up economy
The question on everyone’s mind these days is, “How close is the tech bubble to bursting?” To put it more succinctly, “Who among us is the greater fool?” From the outside, the industry looks stable. Under the covers, most investors follow the same playbook: provide funding to start-ups to drive growth; demonstrate growth to secure more funding; rinse and repeat until the company goes public or bust. Unfortunately, for most start-ups, the latter is more often the case. (read more…)
CATEGORY: alternative financing, growth, winner take all
June 20, 2018 Ilya Strebulaev via Stanford GSB : Inside the Secret World of Venture Capital
If you think talking a venture capital firm into funding your startup is hard, try getting one to share its secrets with you. That’s the challenge Stanford Graduate School of Business finance professor Ilya Strebulaev took on when he founded the Stanford Venture Capital Initiative, which has been steadily amassing a deep and unprecedented database designed to figure out how the VC world really works (read more…)
May 16, 2018 Kevin Roose, New York Times : The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now. Enjoy It While You Can
The new way to make it in business is to spend big, grow fast and use Kilimanjaro-size piles of investor cash to subsidize your losses, with a plan to become profitable somewhere down the road. (read more…)
CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, valuation, VC
January 9, 2018 Pitchbook : A Dynamite Year for VC
In 2017, record-breaking fund sizes and unprecedented levels of dry powder gave rise to mega-deals and dramatic shifts in the exit market. Outsized funds spark outsized deals. Driven by strong VC fundraising and non-traditional investor activity, capital invested reached the highest levels in over a decade while deal volume dropped. The result? Fewer, but larger, deals. (read more…)
CATEGORY: growth, VC, winner take all
December 6, 2017 First Round Capital : State of Startups 2017
Before we do, though, we want to acknowledge the significance of two ongoing conversations in our industry — both of which are heavily represented in the results we chose to feature. The first is about diversity and inclusion, which we incorporated into last year's survey to get founders' perspectives on root causes and possible solutions. And the second is about sexual harassment. We included a number of questions about this issue in 2017, and the results were stark. At First Round, whenever we ask founders what data they most want and need, they almost always say the same thing: they want to know what other entrepreneurs are thinking and doing (and whether what they're doing is normal or in line with their peers). To answer these questions, we're pleased to publish the industry's largest set of data specific to the founder and startup experience — we hope you find it informative and insightful. (read more…)
CATEGORY: growth, leadership, resilience
October 22, 2017 Jonathan Lu via Startup Grind : Using Experimental Design to set sales strategy in a SaaS Startup
Tom Tunguz, a partner at Redpoint Ventures and author of Winning with Data, recently wrote an insightful article titled Monte Carlo Simulations Of Inside And Outside Sales Teams In A SaaS Startup about the value of a balanced inside/outside sales approach. He ran a simple Monte Carlo simulation to express in probabilistic terms the benefit of following a barbell portfolio approach a la Nassim Taleb: balance the high predictability / fast sales-cycle of your inside sales team with the slow sales-cycle / high upside of your field sales team. From one math nerd to another, I loved Tom’s analytical approach to quantify what is qualitatively intuitive, and found myself wanting more. Experimental Design enriches this conclusion by showing the value of thicker barbell plates: empower those field sales reps who you rely on to swing big to get more at bats, and those inside sales reps who you rely on for consistency to close with greater regularity. (read more…)
October 12, 2017 YCombinator : The Hidden Forces Behind Toutiao: China’s Content King
Toutiao launched in 2012. The app uses machine and deep learning algorithms to source and surface content that users will find most interesting. Toutiao’s underlying technology learns about readers through their usage – taps, swipes, time spent on each article, time of the day the user reads, pauses, comments, interactions with the content and location – but doesn’t require any explicit input from the user and is not built on their social graph. Today, each user is measured across millions of dimensions and the result is a personalized, extensive, and high-quality content feed for every user, each time they open the app. (read more…)
CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, product-market fit
October 12, 2017 Jon Westenberg via Medium : No, Trello Didn’t “Fail To Build A Billion Dollar Business
I have no real interest in billion dollar companies. I’m interested in companies that serve their customers, build amazing products and make money. If they happen to reach a billion, that’s great. But getting to a billion is not a goal that keeps me up at night. (read more…)
CATEGORY: growth, leadership, valuation
October 12, 2017 CRV via Medium : SaaS Waterfall Metrics 3–2–1
The calculations and definitions of SaaS businesses are fairly standardized, but the format of the data exchanged and reported on is all over the map. Having spent five years in the VC industry and seeing pretty much every variation of an up and to the right ARR chart out there (and down and to the right), I’ve decided to post my preferred format. Ideally this will prove helpful for startups and investors often juggling terminology and answering the question: “How did you do in Q1? (read more…)
April 30, 2017 Tom Tunguz : A Spike of Venture Debt in Startups
Venture debt is an attractive way of financing a company’s operations because it’s less expensive and less dilutive than an equity round. As the amount of equity investing in Series As and Bs has exploded, venture borrowing has followed, and a new market has blossomed at the very latest stages. (read more…)
CATEGORY: alternative financing, debt, growth