Insights
Our perspectives, learnings, and insights on traction, venture capital, and product management.
Author: Harlan Milkove
How VCs are Gaining Early Exposure to the Future Boom of Autonomous Vehicles
Phantom Auto’s Raises $13.5M to fuel its commercial vehicle teleoperations Platform. Bessemer Ventures believes that this platform will enable the proliferation of autonomous vehicles. Last Thursday, Phantom Auto announced a $13.5M Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The Mountain View-based startup is a software developer for the teleoperation of autonomous vehicles. Phantom Auto…
Polarr raises $11.5M to Take Aim at Edge Computing Dominance
Why Threshold Ventures is placing a bet on mobile-first enterprise collaboration and cross-platform edge computing Last month, Polarr announced an $11.5M Series A round led by Threshold Ventures with participation from Cota Capital and Pear Ventures. The San Jose-based startup is the developer of applications that allow customers to easily edit their visual content with…
Nail Your Startup’s New Year’s Resolutions
Take 2019 by the horns by subjecting your goals to a premortem. It’s the time of year when the founders in my orbit are discussing their company’s goals for 2019. Every one of them is excited to take the new year by the horns. Their goals are specific, impactful, and carefully modeled in spreadsheets. Their…
The Value of a Startup’s Vision Statement
Why a Vision Statement is the most important line of code a startup will ever write. Traditional Vision Statements are Exciting for the Company A traditional vision statement is aspirational for a company; it describes where the company is going if it’s successful. It can also be limiting when viewed through the lens of a venture capitalist.…
A Hard Fork in the ICO Market
In Q3, ICO markets finally developed a demand for traction. The ICO market has experienced a sudden cultural shift that has left concept-stage blockchain founders grappling with the same increased demand for evidence of traction that has long stymied founders trying to raise capital in traditional VC markets. The median ICO dollar size and overall volume of deals…
Time Travel to Save your Startup
Dramatically improve the odds of your venture’s success by rooting out and mitigating knowable risks with a premortem. In startup culture, optimism tends to flourish at the expense of honest pessimism. At Foundational, we embrace this by starting our strategy engagements collaborating with our clients to agree on how the world must be changing, what…
Trust — The Missing Feature Your Customers Demand
The greatest, and often unforeseen, challenge healthcare technology startups must resolve is establishing trust with their end-users. While all startups face various challenges related to trust, the healthcare space most clearly illustrates the need to interweave it throughout a product’s value propositions and user experiences. We’ve seen the impact of fine-tuning these two specific areas…
The Fundamentals of Traction
What is Traction? Where does it come from? And, most importantly, how do you generate it? Startups are in an endless pursuit of product-market fit. If they are very young, they might still be defining their vision of what the world will look like should they find it. If they are more mature, they are justifying…
Closing the Product Management Gap
How to eliminate the #1 killer of startups I recently wrote about the Product Management Gap: the period of time between having a successful demonstration of a technical innovation (the proof-of-concept) and when a full-time team member is assigned to focus on managing the product(s) that feature it. The Product Management Gap is a pervasive and deadly…
The Product Management Gap
The #1 cause of death for startups is a self-inflicted wound The Product Management Gap is the period of time between having a successful demonstration of a technical innovation (the proof-of-concept) and when a full-time team member is assigned to focus on managing the product(s) that feature it. Early-stage funded startups commonly have employees focused on…