Bernard Lunn

Bernard Lunn is a guest author at ReadWriteWeb, after previously serving as Chief Operating Officer. Bernard is a serial entrepreneur and business adviser to start-ups. He is currently Co-Founder of CapitalMarkets.com and Editor Of SaaSInsights. Bernard is based in New York, was born in Berlin, has lived in and started companies in Asia and Europe as well as America; he is comfortable with globalization. He started in online publishing before the Internet (with Prestel in 1980!). You can reach Bernard Lunn at bernard dot lunn at gmail dot com.

Posts by Bernard Lunn

Wednesday, 29th December 2010

Why 2011 May Be The Year For a Sustainable IPO Market

The IPO market may seem like a dim and distant picture for most entrepreneurs in the hardscrabble world of an early stage start-up. How about “making payroll” as a big strategic objective? Or maybe your objective is “get enough money to pay for hosting, coffee and Ramen”? But a healthy IPO market, one that…

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Tuesday, 16th November 2010

10 Tips for Enterprise Software Startups

I started my career in enterprise software in the 1980s and after some years working in other areas (outsourcing and online media) I am back in the enterprise software game. This post is my reflection on what is different and what remains the same. I have focused this as advice to entrepreneurs building enterprise software ventures today. 1…

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Wednesday, 3rd March 2010

Is XBRL The Key To Escaping Small Cap Hell?

Small cap hell is where you end up in about six months after your IPO, when all the high fives and champagne have receded into a distant memory. Unless your company is big enough. How big is big enough? According to Investopedia, small cap refers to companies with "a market capitalization of between $300 million and $2 billion." That's right, to…

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Friday, 19th February 2010

Yammer: The Story Behind Their SaaS Traction

It looks like the joke may have been on me. When Yammer debuted from TC50 in 2008 I posted a very negative story. That is unusual. I am an entrepreneur and know how hard it is to build a startup so I love celebrating the success stories. In Yammer's case, it looks like I was wrong. (This is one case where I love being proved wrong!) In the last…

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Friday, 12th February 2010

How Much Venture Capital Should You Raise For Your SaaS Venture?

The short answer is "as much as you need". The more tactical answer is "as much as you can raise cheaply". The latter is a pragmatic view. Raise more than you need when times are good. Just because you raise it does not mean you need to spend it - capital efficiency is always good! In this post I look at what VC are saying SaaS ventures need to…

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Wednesday, 20th January 2010

Study: SaaS Pricing Is Still Opaque And Freemium Is Rare

If you are building a SaaS (Software as a Service) venture, you should be thinking hard about your pricing strategy. It may be the single most critical decision you make. Pricing impacts your marketing, financial and organizational strategy. Are you selling an expensive, complex enterprise solution? Or a simple impulse purchase that an individual…

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Saturday, 5th December 2009

Technical Q&A With FAROO Founder

About 18 months ago, we wrote about an obscure search startup from Germany called FAROO. We believed that its radical alternative, using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, had a shot at being a real disruptive force. Today, it has made some progress, has raised some money and is getting out into the market. (Disclosure: FAROO is currently a…

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Saturday, 28th November 2009

XBRL: Accounting Geeks Get Radical

It is not often that something as deeply geeky as XBRL gets onto the front page of Wired magazine. Daniel Roth's superb article about radical transparency raised the profile of those four letters. What could be more boring than an XML standard for accountants that has been around for a decade? On the other hand, what could be more exciting than…

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Thursday, 26th November 2009

Creathor Venture: European VC Moving to Federated Model for Global Expansion (RWS Interview)

Creathor Venture is a 25-year-old venture capital firm based in Germany and Switzerland. That makes it unusual. In 1984, when it started, not a lot of VC funds were in Europe. So, we decided to speak with Cédric Köhler in Creathor's Zurich office. As innovation accelerates and globalizes, we wanted to find out how a smaller regional fund like…

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Monday, 2nd November 2009

Microsoft Embraces Open Source (in the Online Ad Business)

It's called a spoiler tactic. You take your competitor's biggest cash cow and offer a free alternative. Everybody from Linux to Google has used the tactic against Microsoft. So who can fault Microsoft when it uses it against Google's advertising cash cow? The guys who benefit from this tactic today are the good folks at OpenX, the open-source…

Enterprise Bernard Lunn comments

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