Archive for January, 2009

Raising money, VC or Angels?

Everybody know that if you wat to raise money for a startup you should ask them to Ventur Captalist Fund or to Angels. But what’s the real difference? When to aks to the first ones, and when to second ones? This article form entrepreneur.com should help you. The article has been written by Bred Feld an early stage investor.

As a venture capitalist, I get approached several times a day by entrepreneurs looking to raise money. One of my typical responses is, “You shouldn’t be talking to me; you should be targeting angel investors.”

The source of this confusion varies: Sometimes it’s a misunderstanding of the different roles and expectations of a venture capitalist vs. an angel investor. Other times it’s a lack of clarity on the part of the entrepreneur regarding what he or she wants to accomplish with both the business and the financing. Regardless of the source of the confusion, here are a few guidelines for determining whether you should be approaching venture capitalists or angels for your financing.

 

  • The amount of money you’re raising in this round: If you’re raising less than $1 million, you’re likely wasting your time targeting venture capitalists, with two exceptions: 1) you specifically target funds that do seed rounds, or 2) you have a preexisting relationship with a VC firm and want to put together a seed round to get going quickly.
  • The total amount of money you’re looking to raise over the life of your company: If you think you can get your company to a point where it’s cash-flow positive on less than $3 million, stick with angels.
  • The type of company you’re building: Venture capitalists love to fund businesses with the potential to be enormous. Angels love this, too, but they’re much more willing to fund smaller companies that will presumably require less capital. In addition, most venture capitalists want to fund businesses that have clearly defined economies of scale (such as software companies) vs. ones that scale linearly with some factor (such as service companies).
  • Your experience: Successful serial entrepreneurs always find it easier to raise money from venture capitalists. If you’re a first-time entrepreneur, that doesn’t mean you can’t raise VC money, but you’re going to find it more difficult than an experienced entrepreneur will.
  • Your network: If you’ve never met a venture capitalist before and none of your colleagues have built companies with VC funds, you’re at a disadvantage by having to start from scratch. In contrast, if your best friend’s father is the CEO of a Fortune 1000 company, you have a good shot at quickly getting plugged into a powerful set of angels.

As with all guidelines, there are plenty of exceptions. One seems to hold in most angel financings: the rule of thirds. A third of your financing will come from one investor, the second third will come from a set of people following that investor and the last third will be random. So make sure you go hunting for your lead investor.

Heroku rocks!

I’m really impressed from Heroku and I want to share it with you. Heroku is a startup (YCombinator sponsored) that created a web app that let you create, develop, manage and publish a Rails application. Even if it’s just web app you could use the script-console, and overall a wonderfull API based on GIT that let you really do anything with your app!

If you design and develop with Rails you couldn’t miss it!

Good work Heroku! Keep on working!

Google tell user to drop IE6, i don’t!

Google aver ever suggested to users drop ie6 and switch to modern browser. Now bigG don’t support ie6 user anymore. Recently other web-based app acted like google. I understand that ie6 sucks but a web app should work with any browser.
Maybe not all the function could works or you could have some UI problems but any javascript browser should be supported. This is my opinion, naturally and this the way i take my decision for my webapp Kontup. It’s designed to work with FF2.0 and above but it works with any browser. In Safari or IE6 you could find some bugs, but anyway it works! I took this decision because if you could decide which browser to install on your PC, maybe if you wish to acceess to your data from anywhere like a webapp should do, you must have the chance to really do it!