The Startup Velocity Question: What Hinders Acceleration in VC Funded Companies?

I have been running 1Mby1M since 2010. I find myself saying to entrepreneurs ad nauseam that VCs want to invest in startups that can go from zero to $100 million in revenue in 5 to 7 years.

Startups that do not have what it takes to achieve velocity should not be venture funded.

Experienced VCs, over time, have developed heuristics to gauge what constitutes a high growth venture investment thesis. 

1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Bootstrapping

Over the course of two years, we have released over 70 courses on Udemy with the aim to democratize entrepreneurship education at scale globally. This series of posts aims to help you find the one you need easily and provide you with discount coupons.

The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 1)

I write this series with great pleasure, as my former graduate school advisor and renowned MIT professor Anant Agarwal unveils his so far stealth-mode company Tilera this week. Tilera could well be the next big breakthrough in processor design.

SM: Anant, please give us some background on where you come from. AA: Growing up, I wanted to be an engineer. I went to school in Mangalore and took the IIT entrance test. I did not have a lot of hope of getting in, and was surprised when it happened. At that time I was working on speech systems. I had been part of a team which built a speech recognition system for Hindi. Then I came to Stanford to work on speech and linear systems theory. Somewhere along the way I switched into computer architecture and began working with John Hennessey, and worked with him on the first MIPS computer. That was 1983. >>>

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Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 1)

Eric Benhamou is a networking industry pioneer. Eric served as the CEO of 3Com from September 1990 until December 31, 2000, and since then, has been its Chairman. 3Com acquired Palm during his tenure as CEO, and later spun it out. For a while, Eric also served as the CEO of Palm, and later its Chairman. In this series, we are going to focus on Eric’s experience as “a young punk” turning around 3Com. Later, in a separate series, we will explore the history of Palm, as told by one of the most well-respected Silicon Valley executives. Steve Jobs had invited him to the Board of Apple, and President Clinton appointed him to chair the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee which advises the President on federal R&D programs to maintain United States’ leadership in advanced technologies.

SM: Eric, where were you born, and what kind of environment did you grow up in? What propelled you to where you are today. EB: I was born in a small village between Algeria and Morocco in the mid 1950’s at a time when the whole region was going through wars. The Algerian war was breaking up at the time, and there was increasing amount of tension between the Algerian population and the French. This forced all of the Jewish population in the region to leave between the 1950’s and the early 1960’s. We were part of the massive exodus. There were three destinations: Israel, France and the US / Canada. Our family went to France which is where I went to primary school and high school. As I grew up in France, I felt moderately comfortable, but not terribly comfortable. Clearly I did grow up in the French culture; French was my mother tongue. As I became a teenager I was no longer sure that I wanted to live there. >>>

Lessons for CleanTech Entrepreneurs: Raychem CEO Paul Cook (Part 1)

Paul Cook is a legend. I had the great honor to spend some time with Paul over the last few weeks, understanding the story of how he built Raychem from scratch.

Today, Silicon Valley has embarked on yet another evolution in its history, and has been consistently committing huge chunks of capital on a genre of technology companies and entrepreneurs that have popularly come to be known as Cleantech, and encompasses clean energy, water, and other such segments.

My core thesis is that Raychem was a company that succeeded in building an Industrial powerhouse based on innovative technology, and can be a great example for these Cleantech companies and their investors to learn from. >>>

Concur CEO Steve Singh (Part 1)

Concur CEO Steve Singh recently did an interview with me to discuss the development of Concur Technologies (CNQR). Concur helps corporations lower travel and expense processing costs by streamlining the expense reporting process. It is one of the companies I have covered as part of my Enterprise 3.0 series.

SM: I would like to trace the story of how you built the company. What I would like to start with is your personal background. Where do you come from, where did you grow up and what was your early career? SS: I am happy to cover that, although it will probably be boring! I was a product of India, but I grew up in Michigan. I spent the early part of my professional career in Silicon Valley working for a division of Apple. I also went off and started a company that became a part of Contact Software which is the maker of ACT. I did a brief stint at Oracle, followed by a stint at Symantec. Most of these changes were due to being acquired. After Symantec I came on board as the CEO of Concur, which was February 1996. >>>

Building the Electronic Arts of Casual Gaming: PlayFirst CEO John Welch (Part 1)

The Internet is changing the content business dramatically, and in this story, we will explore the casual gaming industry through the eyes of entrepreneur John Welch, a gaming industry veteran, who hopes to build a brand as high-impact as Electronic Arts in video gaming, through his venture PlayFirst. I met John a long time ago through the MIT alumni association, and his venture capitalist for PlayFirst is also a common friend of ours, Gus Tai, of Trinity Ventures, also an MIT alum. I promise though, that this will not be a MIT lovefest.

SM: Please describe your personal background.

JW: I grew up in suburban Western Massachusetts, which offered a lot of space as compared to the Bay Area. I was either running around outside or playing with Legos or video games. I loved to swim and ski on both water and snow. We lived in the halo of two world-class cities, Boston and New York. We never went to NYC when I was a kid, but loving the Red Sox and hating the Yankees was a way of life. The Red Sox 2004 World Series victory and the three Patriots Super Bowls were incredible for Massachusetts; we waited a long time to win at a sport we didn’t invent! (Basketball was invented a few miles from where I was born in Springfield, MA.) >>>

Jim Satloff & Neal Goldman’s AI Engine, Inform (Part 1)

It turns out that both Jim Satloff and I happen to be Artificial Intelligence aficionados. What you read here is a discussion on Inform’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) based technology that attempts to create an interesting value proposition for publishers on the web. AI has been a notoriously difficult technology genre with big promises and relatively smaller actualization, except for the Search Engines. Let’s see if what Inform has to offer makes sense. >>>

Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 1)

We have had lots of discussions about Enterprise 3.0. In this interview, I will be speaking with Ken Rudin, CEO of Lucidera, a young company attempting to become a leader in the massive Business Intelligence market by applying Enterprise 3.0 principles. Readers, note that Ken is an experienced serial entrepreneur, and you will learn much by paying attention to how Ken tells his story.

SM: Please describe your personal background : Family, upbringing, early career, etc. leading up to LucidEra.
KR: I was born and raised in New York as the youngest of three siblings. Whereas everyone today talks about the prevalence of “dysfunctional families” in our country, I think I must have been blessed by being part of one of the few “functional families” in America. >>>

Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 1)

I have written a few pieces on how the book publishing business needs to / is going to change because of the web. [Book Publishing Moves West? . Will the Digital Era Change Writing? . eBooks Future]. In this interview, I speak with Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb, who is attempting to democratize self-publishing by making it economic and convenient, bypassing retailers, publishers, and agents.

SM: Please describe your personal background : Family, upbringing, early career, etc. leading up to Blurb. EG: I am a child of immigrants; my mother’s family moved to New York City from Ireland and my father came to the US from England after World War II. My parents met in NYC, had four children, and moved the whole lot of us out to California when I was in second grade. Education, competitive sports (I was a competitive swimmer), and a strong work ethic were the hallmarks of my childhood. My mother was an avid reader and my father an avid photographer, so I guess I come by my interest in both honestly.
>>>

Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

[Also check out my Entrepreneur Journeys book, Seed India – How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India]

Sridhar Vembu is the CEO of AdventNet, which owns Zoho, a new on-demand office suite we’ve been hearing about a lot lately. I spoke with Sridhar about his rather unorthodox but quite successful entrepreneurial journey.

SM: I would like to start this interview by tracing your background. SV: I was born in India, I went to Madras IIT for my undergraduate and came to Princeton to do my PhD in 1989. In 1994 I joined Qualcomm in San Diego. My PhD is in electrical engineering, so I really do not have a software background. I worked on wireless communication which was my area of interest at the time. I worked with Qualcomm for two years. I worked on CDMA, power control and some very detailed issues on wireless communications. That is how I got started in the tech industry.

My brother, who was also there at Qualcomm as a software engineer, wanted to return home to India. Software is a great business to start in India, so he moved back to India and I moved to Silicon Valley to drum up interest in our fledgling venture, which later became AdventNet. >>>

Job Search Engine Indeed CEO Paul Forster (Part 1)

We have been reviewing the Online Jobs vertical at length, and in this interview, will be speaking with Paul Forster, co-Founder and CEO of vertical search engine Indeed.

SM: Please describe your personal background. PF: My professional background is in finance. I was an investment manager with the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, and wanted to start a business around the time I was very involved in recruiting finance professionals.

Using the internet for recruitment made a lot of sense and some successful job boards were already emerging, but there wasn’t a good finance-dedicated job board. So, in 1998, I founded Jobsinthemoney together with Rony Kahan who I had known since we did MBAs together at INSEAD business school in 1994. We grew this business to profitability before it was acquired in late 2003. Rony and I subsequently founded Indeed in 2004. >>>