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By VStart, on March 8th, 2010
Want to know how Venture Capitalists think about valuing your startup company? Here is an article by Scott Lenet of DFJ Frontier, who have a Sacramento office. Looks like formulas aren’t used; rather valuation is based on three things:
- Valuation of deals done on comparable companies
- Investors’ experience, and having the opportunity to see many deals, done or not
- Whether the investment return at the time the company exits (e.g., sells to another company, or does an IPO), under the best circumstances, meets the VC firm’s criteria
The article could lead one to think that a 10 times (10x) return is great for the investor. Well, we are Read More »»
By VStart, on February 9th, 2010
Brett Owens of Chrometa was one of the first entrepreneurs mentored by VentureStart. We recommended “go get customers” rather than trying to raise money from organized investors. He did that and has been growing ever since with an ever-increasing customer base.
Chrometa maintains an excellent blog and today we saw an interesting post on customer support for software companies and its challenges. Take a look and I think you’ll find that Chrometa have met the challenge well with some good thinking. The very fact their blog talks about this is also great marketing. Go Chrometa!
By VStart, on January 30th, 2010
VentureStart gets many Sacramento region web startups applying for our mentoring. Very often we see great ideas and the need to raise money to hire people to code the idea/application. We normally encourage these startups to get a co-founder, or someone who will work for stock, on the team, and then get some traction before even considering raising money from Angel groups or VCs.
Adam Kalsey, the founder of SacStarts and a VentureStart mentor, recently gave advice on this to one VentureStart entrepreneur and then published it on his blog. We quote it here since it is so relevant to web startups.
Read More »»
By VStart, on January 19th, 2010
We saw a great video today that every startup entrepreneur should take a look at. It is an online interview by Jason Calacanis of Brad Feld. Jason is an outspoken entrepreneur who recently created a huge online discussion about entrepreneurs having to pay substantial dollars to present to Angel investors. Brad Feld is an entrepreneur, turned Angel and VC, who is very entrepreneur centric and has a widely read blog (that’s where we found this).
This video is 2 hours long but the first 90 minutes are really worth listening to. It covers these topics:
- Types of Angel investors and cautions about the Read More »»
By VStart, on January 14th, 2010
The Sacramento Angels, together with the Sierra Angels, led a multi-million dollar financing for San Francisco web annotation startup company, Reframe It. They were joined by other regional angel groups and individual angels. You can read the web press release here, and see another report of the financing gathered, in part, from the filing with the SEC of Form D here.
There are a couple of interesting points for entrepreneurs about this financing. First, you can see that to raise this kind of money from Angels, it takes a lead (the lead negotiates the deal terms, Read More »»
By VStart, on December 16th, 2009
Phil Reed was the co-founder of both ComputerLand and BusinessLand, two highly successful startups, both of which went public. He’s raised capital from the top venture capital firms in the world and also been part of small companies that never fulfilled their promise and had to shut their doors (if you ask him, those were the source of the most valuable lessons he’s learned). In fact, Phil has founded or co-founded over a dozen companies during his career and he is incredibly passionate about sharing those lessons and helping budding entrepreneurs.
So here are Phil’s top twelve lessons for entrepreneurs. Call it “Phil’s twelve days of Christmas for start-ups”. (You can Read More »»
By VStart, on November 2nd, 2009
Many startups with high growth ambitions immediately think of raising money from angels or VCs. This can be challenging for first time entrepreneurs, and if family and friends money is not an alternative, then the choices left are often credit cards or bootstrapping. Here is a post on the top 10 lessons in bootstrapping from VentureBeat.
There are two ways to build a business: Raise a bunch of money or bootstrap. When I was in business school, there wasn’t much attention given to the bootstrapping notion. The “MBA way” of growing a business is to write a business plan, raise money and then execute the business plan. But I think that’s Read More »»
By VStart, on November 2nd, 2009
Every wonder if you have what it takes to be a founder or co-founder of a company, or even an early participant. Below we copy a post from Steve Blank’s blog.
When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves:
Are you comfortable with:
- Chaos – startups are disorganized
- Uncertainty – startups never go per plan
Are you:
- Resilient – at times you will fail – badly. How quickly will you recover?
- Agile – you may find the real opportunities for your company was somewhere Read More »»
By VStart, on October 5th, 2009
We just saw this post on Techcrunch about the CBS acquisition of MaxPreps a few years ago and thought it worth reposting here.
Shhhh…your not supposed to mention Sacramento. Don’t make us send our catering crew over there…..
1st rule of building a startup in Sacramento is your not supposed to mention Sacramento
2nd rule of building a startup in Sacramento, is your NOT supposed to mention Sacramento.
3rd rule of bootstrapping in Sacramento, is that if we are mentioned frequently on TC or elsewhere our talent and engineers get recruited to SV/SF, only to return when the bubble goes limp, taps out or bursts.
4th rule of Read More »»
By VStart, on October 3rd, 2009
Coming soon, an organization dedicated to the goal of nurturing entrepreneurism in the greater Sacramento region. No dues, no fees, no sales pitches. Just real help and motivation for people who think they might want to start a company here in the region. This group is being formed by investors and entrepreneurs who want to help others start and grow successful businesses here, without having to move their company or raise their money in the Bay area. Click here to get more information when it’s launched.
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