Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship, Mentors

How to set milestones for your startup before you raise money from investors

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The question “What do you want to be when you grow up” is a pain to answer for kids as it is for startup entrepreneurs. Most times you just dont know. Sometimes you ask other people in the hope that it will lead to an answer that you can co-opt. Other times it is not clear yet (unlike with kids) if you will ever grow up.

Even if you dont want to grow up, I’d still recommend you spend some time putting together milestones that matter to your company for an 18-24 month period from when you start so you know what you are shooting for.

The milestones fall into many buckets, but they should answer the question:

“If you hit the milestones you set out for your company, would you be much more valuable as a startup than you are now”?

The relative sense of “much more valuable” indicates that this is very different for each company, founder, market and type of startup. Most entrepreneurs who are focused on B2B bemoan that they are measured to revenue metrics, compared to their B2C counterparts who usually are measured on user growth (or engagement).

Regardless of what you are measured on, the key is to ensure that you document the most important metrics that will move the value of your startup.

So, to set milestones, the first step is to agree on metrics to measure, and then the date by when they will be achieved.

Here are some examples.

1. Revenue metrics. Regardless of what the new “temporary” trend might be, revenue and profit trumps all. In the early stages of your company, profit will be an illusion, so I would focus a lot on revenue growth. How quickly you grow revenue and have reduced churn, better predictability and more diversity gives an investor more confidence in your business. If you need to have one metric alone in place I’d recommend a revenue growth metric. As in most things, quality and quantity of your revenue metric matter.

2. Absolute # of customers / users metric: In some cases, when the revenue is not significant initially (for example you are in the razor blades and razors model of a business) then I’d focus on growth in # of customers. Again, like the previous metric, quality and quantity both matter. If you are an enterprise software business, getting the initial key marquee customers matters more than any customer. In B2C, this is widely followed with startups tracking # of users, MAU, DAU, or engaged users, or a proxy for # of users (# of snaps sent for example).

3. # of employees: This used to be a metric people tracked, but I am not sure this really matters as much in terms of growth. I’d focus more on the quality and profile of employees alone, instead of a growth in # of employees,. If, however you are in a consulting or services business and this metric drives revenue, by all means this becomes important to track.

There are many more metrics you could track, but the key question you have to answer is “Will this metric(s) drive my startup’s value higher. You can also track metrics that are a proxy for the metrics I listed above. This is so that you can communicate it externally and get people excited about it, instead of having to share a revenue metric.

In some cases, (like Uber for example) the # of rides as a proxy for revenue might be tracked.

Then the next part after you select the metric, (typically one is preferred) is to draw a line in the sand for those metrics –

What would those numbers be and by when would you achieve them.

This part is the “setting milestones”. It has to come with a “sell by date” or “achievement date”.

Simply setting metrics alone, without the date of achievement is typically useless.

The important next steps is to break down the milestone into smaller more achievable milestones during your progress (monthly, quarterly, etc.). This is so you can communicate with your team and have them all rally behind the milestone.

Entrepreneurship

Cold calling does not work during, customer development process, so what does work?

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As many entrepreneurs start their customer development workshops at their accelerator programs, they quickly realize that “Cold calling” potential users to get feedback does not work, any more especially for B2B users. In 99% of the cases, most of our participants at the Microsoft Accelerator found out that they got voicemail, with no responses, over the last 4 cohorts.

Most accelerator programs tell you to call potential users, who are not your “friends and family” to prevent many cognitive biases. The first couple of weeks is spent by most entrepreneurs trying to identify potential users and spending time trying to get them to validate the problem. This is the most uncomfortable time for most entrepreneurs.

It is an absolutely important part of the development of your company, but the caveat is that many entrepreneurs find out that cold calling does not work any more. Most Americans are unlikely to pick up the phone from unrecognized numbers.

In fact, when you try to do it in B2B situations, and call the potential user’s work number, at their desk, it is worse. The number of times you go directly to voicemail is about 999 out of 1000. “Smile and Dial” is truly the most frustrating part of your customer development.

The situation is so bad that many entrepreneurs sometimes falsely believe after their customer development phase that no one truly has the problem.

Most people dont want to be interrupted, and dislike having a synchronous discussion with a stranger.

So, what are the alternatives to cold calling and what can you change.

First, you can change the “interruption” and align it with their routine, then you can remove the “synchronous” portion and make it “asynchronous” and third you can change the “stranger” to acquaintance.

1. To remove the interruption, the best is to put your feedback gathering into the flow of the problem. So, like native ads, you have to insert yourself into the normal course of the problem surfacing for your users. The best way to start this effort is to do a “Day in the life” scenario mapping of your potential user. I would typically do it in 30 min increments.

Find out when the problem surfaces and what the “Triggers” are for users. What I have found is that you can leverage moments of downtime to target your message and bring out the pain. For example if you are selling keyword optimization services to SEO marketers,  answer questions on Quora or LinkedIn Groups about these services so they are aware of the problem. Or ask a question on an active forum (something WhatsApp did) about the problem you are trying to tackle.

2. Email seems to work, to make the conversation asynchronous. If targeted, specific and brings value to your user before you make the request or have a call to action, it is powerful. Typically you’d want the email to be highly personalized (look at the users recent Twitter or social media feed) to start the conversation with highly relevant topical points, before asking for advice.

3. To remove the stranger problem, dig your well before you are thirsty. In fact, use social media (Twitter and LinkedIn groups work very well, as do Quora and SlideShare) to build “acquaintance” relationships well before you need them.

Finally, make it easy for people to give you feedback. Before they are willing to commit time to giving you feedback make them believe they will get value from your interaction as well.

I’d love to know what’s worked for you. Drop me a note on Twitter, if you have found a better way to engage users during customer development.

Entrepreneurship, Funding

What drives early stage valuation multiples of tech #startups?

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Almost every company I have talked to in the last 2 weeks ( total of about 12 startups) has a question around valuation multiples they should expect for their company. While many are concerned about dilution and loss of control, I think the bigger worry should be the high bar of flawless execution priced into valuations.

Basically the way it works is that the higher the valuation multiple (to your revenue, forward-looking growth or execution to date), the less room you have for errors. The higher the valuation, the more flawless your execution needs to be. Else you will be either replaced as the founding CEO, or face a lower valuation in your next round (called down round, and cause cramming).

I had a chance to talk to about 20 founders who recently raised money in the last 5 weeks. All of them, except 3 have raised money in the US, and of the remaining 18-19, 7 have raised money outside the Silicon Valley.

Most investors (seed or institutional) are always looking for a “low” valuation. Few may be looking for a “fair” valuation at the early stage. Often, it is impossible to determine what the valuation of a company is or how much the multiple on their metrics should be.

The “easier” (relatively speaking) valuation multiples are determined on your revenue, if you have any, profit (still rare) or other metrics that you can sell your investors on (e.g. user growth in the case of social networks for example, when you are not yet making money).

The tougher “nice to have” valuation multiples are on the management team, market size, etc. These negotiations are always harder than those on metrics.

So what metrics matter? According to the 20 folks I spoke with, they all fell into – revenue, expected growth (what the investors believed they would be in 12, 18 or 24 months) and growth to date (execution).

Step 1: The range of the valuation multiple would be determined for most of these by an arbitrary “market size” number and many quoted “angel list” averages as a good starting point.

Step 2: Then the investors would dive into their current revenues (12 of the companies are making some money). The range for multiple of revenue ranged from 5 X (in India) to 30X (at the high end, Silicon Valley, YC company). Interesting that non of my surveyed companies had more than 30X multiple on their valuation, even though, I have heard via anecdotal evidence again, that there companies getting more.

Step 3: The startup then goes through an exercise of growth projections, and obviously, the higher the growth, the more the valuation multiple. The best way to think about this is via a rule of thumb – for every 10 additional percentage points in growth month-on-month, folks are asking for a 1.1X increase in valuation multiple. So someone growing at 20% M-o-M is asking for 2.2X increase in their multiple, above and beyond their revenue multiple.]

Step 4: Looking at past revenue growth, over the last 6-12 months (if applicable). Many founders are pointing to the past growth purely as a sign of good execution, but not an indicator of future growth numbers. Most founders I talked to believe they will grow faster with the money than without, which the investors discount, since they believe they are providing that fuel.

Step 5: Finally, most cited the use of a well rounded management team and recent competitive “whisper numbers” around startups in the same “space” as benchmark metrics for valuation multiples.

I must caution that most of this is anecdotal and not very scientific, but a good rule of thumb.

What I am telling the entrepreneurs at our accelerators is to make sure they factor in “average” valuation multiples for their projections, but execute so they can get the best.

I’d love your input if you have recently raised money. Let me know in your comments if you’d like to have a discussion (via email or on Slack is preferred).

Entrepreneurship, Funding

Who should you raise money for your #startup from if you had a choice?

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I got a question from a friend Abhinav Sahai, as a follow up to my post “Does who you raise money from limit or grow the size of your ambition?”

What are the parameters that one should look at when choosing ‘who’ to raise money from? 

I am going to give you the easy answer first to the question. This is based on my observation that most entrepreneurs find it extremely hard to raise money for any number of reasons – positioning, not being in the network, not having sufficient traction, etc.

The answer is “Whoever is willing to give it to you”.

For over 80% of entrepreneurs that answer should be sufficient, unfortunately.

Lets assume though that you are in a position to receive interest from multiple investors and you have to make a choice. Or you are going about your fund raise in a strategic fashion and are looking to target specific investors who you’d like to bring on board at your startup.

The overarching theme to address this question is to bring folks who provide “Smart Capital“.

Most investors will give you money. That’s why they are an investor.

What you need in addition to the capital is what you should be looking to get from investors if you have the choice.

1. In some cases that might be connections and networks – to other investors, to potential customers, partners or future employees.

2. In other cases it might be expertise and insights – how to address questions that you will face while you scale and grow your startup.

3. In still other cases it  might be credibility and advice – being associated with top folks in your industry gives you a leg up over others.

4. In still other cases you might just want someone you can trust and sound ideas off. Knowing that your startup journey is going to be long and lonely means you need folks to help keep your morale up or to help you gain perspective.

They may be more things you might need in addition to capital, but most will fall into these 3-4 buckets.

Typically most folks will tell you that they can bring their expertise and connections. 

If you can be strategic about your fund raising (meaning you have good runway, or have great traction), then I’d highly recommend you look at your fundraising as a project that the CEO undertakes herself.

It will take about 3-6 months (elapsed time) from start to finish, so you should be willing to be patient, and consistently follow up as with any strategic project.

So the question then becomes how do you gauge if someone has expertise or connections?

The simple test is to ask them questions you face daily and look for depth of the answers, the breadth of their knowledge and the ability for them to customize their learning to your needs. That will give you a sense for their expertise.

The depth and breadth of their network is also easy to test – ask them to introduce you to 2-3 people you have been trying to meet to help validate your plan.

Above all I’d highly recommend you reference check. Talk to others in their network who they have invested with or other entrepreneurs they have invested in to get a sense for the investor.

The most critical question you can ask is how they respond to tough situations. 

100% of all startups go to hell and back before they are a success or a failure. When you have supportive investors to help you along the hard journey, it will be a lot less stressful.

Marketing, Tips

What to do the day after the launch of your company or announcing new features

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There is always a sense of euphoria after a “launch” of any sort. Especially if you have been working on your product / service for many months and are not particularly sure how it will be received. Then you get a chance to go “public” with your features / product or company. It tends to be exhilarating, but brings its own set of things to do after the launch.

There are 3 major buckets of items that you will encounter the day after the launch.

They fall into the “do now”, “do later” and “do never” bucket.

First the “Do Now” bucket. I would put thanking people that supported you on the top of the list. Send personal emails to the reporter, initial users, advisors and mentors with a list of links (combine all coverage instead of sending multiple messages) that indicate the coverage your received for the launch. Even if all you did was launch it on HN, it helps to take a screen shot, or even provide a link to the comments. If you have a team, I’d highly recommend you collate all the links, and put them into a document to share and discuss when you meet. It helps to set context to something you have all been working on. Even if the feedback on the launch is negative or “meh”, I’d still recommend you put it together.

I’d also immediately put together a spreadsheet with the major items of feedback and perspectives, and put them into feature requests, comments, questions and general feedback. Some of them you can action and others likely not. Either ways, it is quicker and more helpful to capture all the feedback just after the launch rather than go back and revisit it later.

Finally I’d spend quite a bit of time providing customer support – helping answer user questions, addressing their issues (without coding new features immediately) and also documenting the bugs they encounter – maybe you might want to even fix the blockers or P zeros (priority zeros).

Second, for your “Do later” bucket. I’d write a blog post to collect your thoughts, and write about your experience overall – what were the highlights when you got your start, what the low lights were, what your journey was and how you made critical decisions. In that blog post I’d also add the links to the launch coverage.

I would also spend some time after day 1 on your traffic analytics – where did you users come from, where they spent time and finally what they did. These will help you prioritize the key elements of your go forward plan and help you target the right press or channels going forward.

This is also a good time (do later, not immediately) to check all your social channels – Quora, FB, Twitter etc. to capture your feedback. I dont put these in the do now bucket, because while you might get some feedback that needs immediate attention, they tend to be a big drain and time sink. You will end up responding to some of the feedback, but most of the response from your side will be emotional – either happy, because your launch was well received, or sad because you were panned.

Finally the “Do never” bucket. You will get a lot of email from potential recruiters – who have “a rock star ninja” who wants to join your team and mentioned your company by name, or potential partners who “want to set up time over coffee to talk about potential ways to partner” or other principals and associates at investment firms who “followed” your launch or were tracking you on angel list or tried your product and would like to setup some time to learn more.

These waste the most amount of your time. I’d highly recommend you push them all out by a few weeks and use it as a technique to buy some time and gauge their interest after 3-4 weeks. While I have learned that there’s some truth to the “strike when the iron’s hot”, these are rarely hot irons, but more “flat coal”.

I’d love your feedback. What’s been on your do now, do later and do never bucket after launch?

Entrepreneurship

The toughest transition for a #startup founder: From a position of control to one of influence

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One of the toughest transitions most entrepreneurs have to make when their organization becomes bigger is to move to being a leader with influence rather than control.

They will no longer be able to have the command and control over their product, customer relationships or employee engagement as they did when the company was smaller, when they did all those things themselves.

The most critical milestone is when you raise your series A. That’s typically only 10% of companies that start, or about 3000 companies a year in the US, about 100 in India, each year.

Of those, there are less than 10% of the founders who are engineers or developers.

They have the toughest time transitioning from being a founding entrepreneur to a CEO.

The series A typically involves getting institutional or professional investors on board, who have critical milestones they set and also help set the pace for the next set of milestones.

Usually during this period, many (not all VC’s) will have the conversation about bringing on a professional CEO on board.

Most investors will give the founding CEO a chance to make mistakes – usually 2-3 times before they start talking to one another about bringing “outside help” with “grey hair”.

The challenge I have seen most developer / hacker CEO’s have, is in understanding the move from being a founder with control to a CEO with influence.

If you have been lucky enough to hire smart and talented people on board, you will realize quickly that they have ideas, thoughts, vision, direction and strategies of their own as well. Which is why you hired them.

Unlike the first few “believers” they are more likely to join because of the market opportunity as well as the “founding team”.

So, as a founder you have to quickly adopt the influencing approach to leadership.

The most important thing to learn about influence is changing how you communicate.

Making room for other ideas, giving them space to voice their opinion and also get their thoughts heard is going to be the most important element of your leadership.

You no longer need to have all the ideas or solve all the problems.

There are others, many who are likely experts in their area of work, whose role it is to solve the problem.

Here are 3 examples of what the change means:

1. Asking more questions than giving answers. When folks come to you with questions, it is extremely hard to not get into a “brainstorming” mode and help think through the problem. Unfortunately, what they really want you to do is to help them come up with the answer.

2. Giving perspectives they have not thought through, than giving advice. People who work for you will come with a plan, strategy or a roadmap for implementing a program. Rather than give them your perspective, which is in most cases your opinion, you are expected to give them a 360 Degree view of the problem with perspective they have not yet thought though, so they can make a well rounded decision, instead of advising them on the way forward.

3. Encouraging problems to be brought out, instead of beginning with solutions. You will be given reverence as a founder, and most people wont want to call your baby ugly, so in many cases you will get a varnished view of the world. Instead you have to encourage problems or challenges to be brought forward so you can help the best minds come up with a solution.

All of this takes more time than before, which I believe is the biggest challenge for most founders. When things were smaller, you could move fast, but now that you have a series A and a larger organization, things might seem to move at a glacial pace.

That’s okay though, since you have more people to work on bigger initiatives than smaller problems you had to tackle earlier.

If you want to still be productive I suggest you always be an individual contributor as well.

Tips

Vision, Execution and Communication, what makes entrepreneurial founders, great CEO’s

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It is often said that the most important things a startup founder and CEO needs to focus on is setting the vision and communicating it effectively, hiring the right people and making sure there’s enough money in the bank.

In the early stages though, the vision is less clear for a company for many founders. What’s more clear (to most entrepreneurs) I assume is the problem they are trying to solve. Or, in many cases the solution they are trying to build.

If you over index on good or excellent execution but have not a clear, well thought out vision, the market, investors and employees will give you time and room to develop. Case in point, it was not always clear what Twitter’s vision was to most people (and probably is still not clear).

So, if you have a great, compelling vision for the future of how the industry (like Marc Benioff did with Salesforce.com), then it does make it easier to grow, fund and scale the company, but if you dont, I wont sweat it.

There are many forms of communication, but the 3 I am focusing on are public speaking, written communication and articulation in a personal setting.

Not surprisingly, if you are afraid of public speaking (which apparently is the 2nd most feared thing for most people after death), the market does give you some leeway. There are many entrepreneurs and senior executives who I know, personally, who are poor public speakers and are not at all charismatic. That usually does not seem to stunt their progress though.

If you are not great at written communication, (which can easily be fixed BTW, with practice), the world is not going to end. It does help, but you only have to keep in mind that over 80% of successful founders in the unicorn list have trouble writing something meaningful even with the 140 character limit that Twitter proposes.

If however you can’t articulate the problem you are trying to solve in 1-1 situations or answer the difficult questions about why your company exists, what it does and how it will solve a problem, then potential co-founders, employees, investors and customers will not give you much leeway.

There are certain situations when even poor articulation (which I have seen multiple times when folks come to pitch their product to us) is something we accept and assume we can help with.

That situation is when someone has executed very well. Whether it is building a compelling product, getting early customers, growing user base or raising funding rounds, doing beats telling 95% of the time.

From time to time, we (potential employees, customers or investors) get enamored by a good story, articulated by a charismatic, passionate and visionary founder, and it may happen more than in exceptions than the rule.

The thing is though, you can’t argue with execution at the partner meeting or at the customer review or when you are talking to your friends about a company you want to join.

Either they did what they did or did not – either they got users and growth or not. They have customers or they dont. They have a product that users like or they dont.

They executed or they did not.

Which is why, even if you being told you dont have a great vision or that you are poor at telling your story or you have bad communication skills, take heart.

If you out-execute and show the proof in the pudding, by numbers, metrics and growth, the market and the participants will let you get away with your “weaknesses” or perceived faults in vision or communication.

Entrepreneurship, Learning

Before you know it, your startup is now a “big” bureaucracy with “approvals” for everything

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Often when I meet wannabe entrepreneurs at events, I ask the question, why they are willing to give up their relatively easy job, with good pay to take up the roller coaster world of starting their own company. About 20% or so of the folks I meet at these events work at another startup (typically < 3 years old, about 20-50 people). I think of most of these companies as startups as well, so I am curious as to why, after seeing all that happens in an early stage startup, they want to start their own company.

Sometimes it is because they want to be their own boss, or they see the success of the founders, who they claim have little intelligence, but still managed to start their own company and be moderately successful. At other times, I hear the burning itch to start and solve a problem or other times it is because they always wanted to start one, but were not able to because of other constraints.

Every so often I will get a person who was the 1st or among the first 10 employees of a startup. They will reminisce about the “early” days of the startup they are working at and talk about how everything was simple and easy during those days and how bureaucratic their 50-100+ person startup had become.

When I press further about the “bureaucracy” and what makes things slow and inefficient, the word that always comes up is “approvals”.

“Approvals” are the tool misguided managers use to make themselves feel important.

If you are a person that needs to feel important so you can “approve” things, you dont have enough work to do.

Approvals are used by big companies to kill any ounce of individual responsibility and trust. They also kill the very initial set of values and culture that you might set out to build your company’s foundations on.

Approvals send one of many messages:

1. I did not hire the right person so I have to ensure they “stick” to the rules of the company that HR has arbitrarily come up with.

2. We have hired way too many people who dont have enough work to do, so they have to be around to “approve” things.

3. We need policies and procedures for everything since we dont trust the folks we hired to use their judgement.

Notice that the common word in these (and most other) examples is “hiring”.

Approvals are the child of poor hiring and recruitment.

You can cop out and say it is a HR problem. It is not actually.

As a founder, it is your responsibility to ensure that the vision and culture of the company are consistent with the ethos you started it out with.

The first 10 employees are indicative of the zeal you brought to the table, which convinced them to join a high risk startup at such an early stage.

If these first 10 and many other employees feel that the company is “approval” heavy and requires big company (productivity killing and sans accountability) procedures, then you have something wrong with your hiring, not with your HR policies.

Remember this, if a manager in your company feels so important to want to “approve” everything anyone does in his organization, he has practically no work and likely a heightened sense of importance.

Entrepreneurship

How to come up with the “one metric” to track and improve at your startup

Yesterday, we had a discussion about OMTM (One Metric that matters) with Chase of GoSkip. There is lots of information about how to chose the metric that matters, and also enough about why it is important. The missing part is how do you choose the metric depending on the stage of your company, the industry you are in and the way to make sure the metric matters to your employees, customers and investors.

It is fairly easy to say that you need to focus on growth – which is fairly obvious, but the question becomes grow what? Users? Revenue? Shares? Likes? Churn?

Picking an arbitrary metric wont hurt you in the short term, but it will not get you to the point of moving your startup forward.

The OMTM changes by stage of the company – from idea stage to prototype and to MVP and PMF. In fact, you will be tempted to put one metric for each part of your organization – engineering, sales, funding etc. – I suggest you dont. It completely defeats the purpose of the OMTM.

There are 3 criteria you need to consider when coming up with your OMTM.

1. The direct impact of that metric to the monetization or valuation of your business – depending on how you intend to eventually monetize, you want to make sure the metric is very closely aligned with that number.

2. The validity of that metric for the duration (time period for which it will be valid). If you come up with a metric that’s going to be valid for less than your next major milestone, I would reconsider it.

3. The ability for anyone in your startup to action based on that metric. If you end up putting a metric together that most people cannot take a direct action within their span of work, you end up not having the metric be meaningful to most of your employees.

Entrepreneurship

Accelerators, more than seed funds have created the glut in early stage companies

There are 3 major trends that have driven startup formation over the last 7 years.

First the cost of infrastructure, thanks to AWS has dropped from hundreds of thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars – 3 orders of magnitude.

Second, the number of seed investors has gone up 5 fold, from 35 to over 250 now.

Third the number of accelerator programs has gone from < 10 to over 635 in the US alone.

The number of startups in technology has remained though constant, at about 20K to 30K per year from the US alone. There has been a slight increase, but not by much. So what gives?

Some questions – has the failure rate increased? The anecdotal evidence is yes, but the real data is inconclusive.

Are startups talking more time to mature? I call maturity as time to get to series A from the time they were formed. If you look at 2007 data, the time to get to VC series A funding (crunchbase data) was 2.2 years.

If you look at 2014 data, the time to get to series A has dropped to 1.6 years.

The size of the rounds have gotten higher, as startups are taking in more money.

The number of side projects (indicated by participation in hackathon’s, which is a proxy but not an easy to measure metric, has increased dramatically by 400%.

So, AWS has allowed you to really reduce the cost of experimenting, more than building a startup alone.

If you look at 2007 data and see the number of seed funded companies that got VC funding as a percentage, the % has reduced by 2014 – largely because there are a lot more companies getting seed funding.

The real difference is the accelerators in the US – they have gone from bringing out 250 companies in 2007 to over 2000 in 2014.

That’s the big (4 times the number of early stage companies) change from 2007.

Accelerators are causing the glut in startups getting in front of institutional investors more than angel funds.