This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 31, 2013

'Pitching is all about telling a story. You''ve practiced long and hard on how you tell your story. So why would you allow someone to play it on mute--or, worse, tell themselves your story based on a misunderstanding of your deck. You also won''t get feedback on whether the deck works because you won''t see them going through it. The very fact that someone is asking for a deck before they decide whether or not to meet with you is a fail in many ways.

pitching 286

pitching venture capital energy technology 286

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 30, 2013

Every SaaS business suffers from churn. If churn isn’t managed properly, the lost revenue from churned customers offsets new revenue and the business flat-lines or suffers negative revenue growth. I’ve seen startups employ three patterns for offsetting churn: acquiring new customers faster, upselling existing customers to buy more software, or structuring pricing to grow with customers.

strategy 40

strategy SaaS startup frameworks 40

Venture Hacks

OCTOBER 26, 2013

I do the onboarding for all new AngelList team members. Part of it is asking them to read the following (many candidates have read these before they even come in for an interview). Culture. Startups are here to save the world. Things we care about at AngelList. Doing the wrong things the right way. Execution. Ask forgiveness, not permission. 1-(wo)man startups.

culture 70

culture strategy founder startup 70

Berkonomics

OCTOBER 31, 2013

'My immediate family members were entrepreneurs from as far back as I can trace. Dad was a jeweler, then a furniture store owner. Mom wrote books and articles from her college days until she could no longer see the keyboard. One grandfather owned and maintained his apartment houses. The other was a grocer, then a jeweler. So it seemed perfectly natural that my brother and I find our separate callings as entrepreneurs from the very start.

entrepreneurs 61

entrepreneurs opportunity development 61

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technology

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 27, 2013

There’s a perpetual and roaring debate in Startupland about the ideal founding team. Should the ideal team be entirely computer scientists? How important to success is having an MBA/business person? What about the stories of billionaire dropouts? To answer that question, I’ve aggregated the academic backgrounds of 30 of the top startups of the past few years and analyzed the make up of each of those founding teams.

startup founder 40

startup founder founder startup education 40

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 31, 2013

Quietly mentioned in yesterday’s press conference about Google’s Android update is a new feature that will change the way people use their mobile phones, search deep-linking. With KitKat, Google is applying its world-class crawling and search technology to the content and data within mobile applications. Quoting from the Verge, >A search for a restaurant will offer a link directly to that restaurant page in the OpenTable app if you have it installed, allowing you to set up a reser

enablement 40

enablement development technology opportunity 40

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 29, 2013

How do you validate an idea for a software startup before the product is built? Last week, a founder of a SaaS business and I were wrestling with this problem. It’s a question without a universal answer. After a while, we came up with quick and dirty rule of thumb for his business. Can he hit his quota? Suppose this founder wasn’t the founder, but the first inside sales hire for the startup.

SaaS 40

SaaS strategy networking founder 40

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 28, 2013

There’s an interesting phenomemon occurring in founder compensation for post-Series A companies: founding CEOs are swapping cash for larger equity stakes in their companies. Founding CEO salaries, post Series A, have fallen by about 24% while founder equity has increased by 32%. This trend is broad. Each year, Redpoint portfolio companies participate in a compensation survey along with the portfolio companies of about 50 other firms, totaling about 800 startups.

startup founder 40

startup founder founder startup financing 40