Helping founders take charge of their startup's destiny | Former M.M.LaFleur, Group Nine, Thrillist, HuffPost | Also ⛷️ 🚵 🏕️ 🐕✍️ | ericashman.com
Funding
The recent WeWork IPO debacle is certainly a great demonstration of how unreliable and arbitrary private company valuations can be. Six weeks ago, WeWork expected to go public at a valuation of as much as $60 billion. Now, they are on the edge of bankruptcy and hoping for a lifeline
Pivot To Profitability
What do WeWork, Uber and Blue Apron all have in common? Two things actually. First, their investors have taken a beating in the past year. WeWork just pulled it's IPO, and might become the fastest company to ever fall from a $47 billion valuation to zero. Uber, which
Pivot To Profitability
Gross Revenue charts on fundraise decks. Gross Revenue used to calculate customer lifetime value. Gross Revenue used to calculate sales team commissions! Gross Revenue is one of those numbers that can make me a little crazy. Because in many types of businesses, it's an incredibly misleading number. It
Pivot To Profitability
This post is for all of the Chief Financial Officers, Chief Operating Officers, and advisors of early-stage companies in the room. A quick word about managing the budget and cash flow process with the founders/CEO's you advise. Someone asked me last week how to manage a planning
Growth
Digiday published an interesting piece yesterday on the subscription pricing strategy of the Daily Beast. For those that don’t know, the Daily Beast is a news and opinion site owned by IAC that was originally founded by Tina Brown in 2008. It has publicly struggled to find a sustainable
Growth
David Frankel, a Managing Partner at Founder Collective, posted an interested tweet last Friday. His point was that if you pull back too hard on growth to try to get to profitability, growth might slow to the point where you will find it very difficult to get back onto the
News and Analysis
If you're interested in the inner workings of the venture capital industry, paying attention to the proposed WeWork IPO is a great place to start. Last week I wrote about the IPO in terms of some of the problems on the company side. But Softbank Capital, WeWork'
News and Analysis
You should be paying attention to the story of the collapsing WeWork IPO. It's a fascinating look at all that can go wrong when a company that is overhyped and overvalued is exposed before they can get through the IPO process. WeWork's most recent valuation was
Growth
In building the Huffington Post, Thrillist, and JackThreads, I've invested a lot of venture capital into building tech platforms. Even though we were media and commerce companies, we described ourselves as tech companies. VC's loved that description. It absolutely helped increase our valuation in every round.
News and Analysis
When I see 99% destruction in value in a once high-flying startup, there must be some useful lessons in there somewhere. I know I'm a bit late on the Tumblr story, but I was on vacation last week! It's hard to keep up with this level
Growth
Have you ever been in the lead on a hike through deep snow? It sucks to be up front. You're the one breaking through all of that fresh snow, stomping it down to make a path for those behind you. It's exhausting, and if you don&
Growth
There is something about being the founder of a company that leads you to believe that you're supposed to be an expert in every discipline, from marketing to software development to creative production. One of the hardest lessons to learn is how to delegate. One of the most