« Survived Fall CTIA | Main | Labor of Love or Fool's Errand »
October 13, 2005
On Being Too Early
I just went through six months of trying to raise money for my latest venture. From the onset, we knew it would be a difficult task because it, for the most part, a tool (not VC friendly) and involved Hollywood (not Sandhill friendly). Having said that, I had the most interest from VCs than any other start-up I have attempted. That is to say, I had the highest ratio of email-to-meeting or phone-call-to-meeting than any other start-up. This is because the idea is quite visionary and, as most VCs, said the vision is right on. To boot, we have an experienced and well-connected team and, more importantly, a large customer. It is just that, alas, the vision is too far out for them. They believe in the vision but not our timeframe.
And this is the story of my "start-up career". I have a CD-R that is a pantheon of my (failed) start-up efforts -- all the investor presentations, business plans, financial models. Some of them are laughable but most were just too far ahead of their time -- there is Iquna which was my first effort with a bunch of colleagues in Munich which was an early variation on RSS...there was a music effort in 1999 which is exactly what Snocap does today. Then there was Earthnoise, a video-sharing community and infrastructure company, when there were only 17 broadband users and the list goes on.
The capital raising effort involved contacting over fifty VCs which in turn led to about ten in-depth meetings. Not all is lost though as I know have a great rolodex of VCs. The start-up is still limping along with money slowly trickling in from the customer. It's a tricky game to play with an erratic cash flow making it hard to hire and pay employees or contractors. The hope is that this painful effort will raise the valuation later when it is the correct time to raise money.
Posted by raza at October 13, 2005 9:41 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)