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Startup Lifecycle Adrian Cockcroft @adrianco

Technology Fellow - Battery Ventures November 2014

@adrianco

Who are Battery Ventures?

• Diversified private investment firm focused on technology and innovation worldwide since 1983

• Investments in more than 375 companies across numerous technology sectors, end markets, business situations and economic cycles

• Broad and loyal LP base

• Proud heritage of being the lead investor and positive agents of change alongside our management team partners

• Currently investing BV X, a $900 million vintage 2013 fund • 10 year life cycle • Stage agnostic • North American, European, & Israeli

focus

@adrianco

Some Current Enterprise Portfolio Companies

Storage

Networking

Compute Big Data Operations & Management

Security

Visit http://www.battery.com/our-companies/ for a full list of all portfolio

@adrianco

Adrian’s 2014 Activities: 26 internal talks 40 public talks, 9 interviews

Enterprise IT CIO/CTO

relationships

Web scale developer

relationships

Technical input on deals

Technology consulting for portfolio

Etc.

@adrianco

Title

Meetings

Hot Deals

Investments

Value Axis

0 1250 2500 3750 5000

30

250

5,000

Typical Large VC Firm Activity in a Year

@adrianco

Lifecycle

@adrianco

Startups are like premature babies in an incubator, hard to conceive, hard to birth,

and will die without constant attention.

@adrianco

Networking

Get to know startup/VC people Become a “go to” expert on something Be helpful, pay it forward Find ideas that resonate Build friendships and trust

1

@adrianco

Investment Thesis

Match yours to the VC’s Commodity replaces custom hardware IaaS replaces datacenter SaaS replaces packaged software Mobile replaces desktop Flash replaces disks

2

@adrianco

Find a Pain Point

What’s the problem? Something you have experienced Something lots of people need fixed Couldn’t do that before Couldn’t afford that before Couldn’t get existing thing to work

3

@adrianco

Your Unfair Advantage

Why will you win? Disruptive business model Unique experience on your team Strategic advantage Speed of execution Defensible patents are not enough

4

@adrianco

Pre-Pitch Brainstorming

Develop your ideas Find VCs that are interested in talking Discover who else is in the same space Get input on gaps in the market Get referrals to other VCs

5

@adrianco

Map Your Strategy6

Simon Wardley http://blog.gardeviance.org/2014/11/how-to-get-to-strategy-in-ten-steps.html Related tools and training http://www.wardleymaps.com/

@adrianco

Plan Your Pitch7

Reinertsen Weissman Neal FordWardley

Strategy Execution Story Polish

@adrianco

Pitching Practice

Try out on friends, distill !

“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one”

Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain

8

@adrianco

Phases and Funding

Self/Angel - ideation ($xx K) Seed - initial product ($xxx K) A - market validation ($x M) B - growing the market ($xx M)

9

@adrianco

Staying Alive

Use VC pattern match advice Deal is done when $ in bank Burn rates, contingency Raise when you don’t need it

10

@adrianco

You are most likely going to fail. Make sure you learn from your failures and

build trust in the VC community, and you will get a second chance.

@adrianco

Some HPC Opportunities: !

Solve problems at scale that migrate to mainstream markets

Bring consumer/enterprise tech to HPC Data science and analytics

@adrianco

Further Reading from Adrian

See www.battery.com for a list of portfolio investments

● Battery Ventures Blog http://www.battery.com/powered ● Adrian’s Blog http://perfcap.blogspot.com and Twitter @adrianco ● Slideshare http://slideshare.com/adriancockcroft

!● Monitorama Opening Keynote Portland OR - May 7th, 2014 - Video available ● GOTO Chicago Opening Keynote May 20th, 2014 - Video available ● Qcon New York – Speed and Scale - June 11th, 2014 - Video available ● Structure - Cloud Trends - San Francisco - June 19th, 2014 - Video available ● GOTO Copenhagen/Aarhus – Denmark – Sept 25th, 2014 ● DevOps Enterprise Summit - San Francisco - Oct 21-23rd, 2014 - Videos available ● GOTO Berlin - Germany - Nov 6th, 2014 ● AWS Re:Invent - Las Vegas - Cloud Native Cost Optimization - November 14th, 2014 ● Dockercon Europe - Amsterdam - Microservices - December 4th, 2014

startup lifecycle - startuphpc.com · get to know startup/vc people become a “go to” expert on...

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