A leading venture capitalist offers a tough-love survival guide: How to keep your company afloat when the IPO market has dried up. Plus, six words you should never use when raising money.READ»
Amazon's purchase of online shoe retailer Zappos was surprising and interesting news all by itself, but now comes a twist: reports that this marriage made in e-commerce heaven may have been a shotgun wedding forced by Zappos' ...READ»
(Crossposted to my Stealthmode Blog)I asked Bill Gurley whether a
new model for early stage funding would emerge now that the VC industry
is "slimming down" (perhaps shrinking by 50%) due to the rebalancing of
university ...READ»
Four years ago, a massive stroke nearly killed Bob Lessin. Now he's left his job as vice chairman of Salomon Smith Barney, poured his own money into 50 Web startups, assumed the leadership of Wit Capital, and single-handedly tried to merge the old economyREAD»
Tesla Motors' well-publicized struggle with growing pains is something of a soap opera. There's divorce, bankruptcy, plane crashes, sports cars, and lots of uncertainty--and the longer we watch, the more complicated things seem to ...READ»
Google intends to raise more money from its much sought-after IPO. The search-engine giant increases the size of its IPO by $1.1 billion on Monday and says it aims at a price range of $108 to $135 per share for 24.64 million ...READ»
Your stock price is down 80%. All of a sudden, that ".com" at the end of your company's name feels like a four-letter word. Life in the Internet economy can't get much worse, can it? Be afraid. Be very afraid.READ»
In the blog Venturpreneur, Gordon Smith takes Google to task for its IPO prospectus. His major criticism: Google doesn't tell a growth story.
With the acquisition of Blogger, the release of Orkut and Gmail, it seems that Google has ...READ»
What We Learned
A Brief History
Profiles
Vocabulary
Where Are They Now?
What You Learned
August 9, 1995: The Big Bang
Netscape, just 16 months old, goes public on the Nasdaq. Shares, first priced at $28, open at $71. ...READ»
Forget Peyton Manning's 365 yards and three TDs for the undefeated Colts last week. Forget Reggie Bush's 500-plus yards against Fresno State. The top performer of the week was Under Armour, the sports apparel company we profiled back ...READ»
Keith Hammonds' April 2003 feature on Google's growth strategy attracted a lot of discussion among Fast Company readers, some of whom thought the company shouldn't go IPO.
Now, Google has taken steps further in that direction. Early ...READ»
Caution: This post contains no actual facts. But so far this week I've had at least four well-placed people tell me--with an uncharacteristic quiver of excitement in their voices--that Silicon Valley is back. Not on its way back. ...READ»
Last August, Seth Godin asked, "What Should Google Do?" Well, today, a better question might be, "What has Google gone and done?"
Google just filed to sell shares in an IPO. So far, response from commentators has been interesting. ...READ»
PC Magazine called it "the most compelling gaming system" in the past three years. Wired pronounced it "a force of nature." The influential AnandTech put it on "the cutting edge of design and technology." While the newly released ...READ»
Back in August, FC Now contributor Seth Godin offered his free e-book "What Should Google Do?" The e-book followed an April Fast Company feature in which Keith Hammonds outlined Google's strategy for success: cutting-edge ideas, ...READ»
You'd think startup wizard Atiq Raza would be getting hammered. He operates in trouble-plagued Silicon Valley, he launches companies in the wildly overbuilt telecom sector, and he runs -- gasp! -- a business incubator. Based on his impressive results, you may want to think again.READ»
It used to be that venture capitalists either went big or went home. If the investment wasn’t $1.5 million or more, the deal just wasn’t interesting to them. Unfortunately, this often left early stage companies facing a funding ...READ»
For entrepreneurs hoping to take their startup public, the outlook is bleak. According to the New York Times, the number of acqusitions and IPOs in the third quarter of this year dropped below even last quarter. That number: three. ...READ»
