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According to Webster’s, a milestone is a
stone or pillar set up to show the distance in miles to or from
a specified place, or when used figuratively, a significant
event in history. In the context of indicators, a milestone is
an intermediate goal used to evaluate progress toward a final
set target.
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Milestones for technology startups are often divided into
various stages depending on the Company's development and
maturity. In this page you can also access milestones by
category.
The difference in milestones from the Asset Sale, Cash Flow Sale
and IPO routes reflects the fact that companies targeting asset
sale are building technologies and products to sell to
organizations with distribution channels in place already. They
do not need to build their own complete sales and marketing
organizations and distribution channels.
Companies heading toward cash-flow sale (an exit route involving
a sale of the Company as a profitable, or cash-flow positive,
business) and those headed toward IPO are very similar and
follow this seed-early-expansion-mezzanine structure.
Notes about Milestones
Milestones have to be achieved in
parallel—when reviewing these milestones, it's important to
recognize that the process is not entirely serial. Management
has to work on several milestones in parallel.
Milestones are different for every company—the list of
milestones has to be tailored for each company to reflect its
specific market, technologies and challenges.
Milestones have dependencies—some milestones cannot be commenced
until others have been successfully completed. |
Milestones En-Route to Cash-Flow
Sale or IPO
Milestones En-Route to Asset
Sale
International Milestones
Milestones by Category
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