By VStart, on March 29th, 2010
Senator Dodd’s current financial reform bill is designed to address financial reform and regulation of the big banks, including the “too big to fail” issue. But it may have unintended consequences by reducing the number of angel investors while at the same time putting regulatory hurdles in place. These hurdles will increase the time it takes (yes, even more!) for entrepreneurs to raise money, and put more bureaucracy in the way further discouraging angel investors.
There is a post on VentureBeat today that has more details and discussion. That post also has some good summary information on the SEC rules that relate to all Read More »»
By VStart, on January 19th, 2010
We saw a great video today that every startup entrepreneur should take a look at. It is an online interview by Jason Calacanis of Brad Feld. Jason is an outspoken entrepreneur who recently created a huge online discussion about entrepreneurs having to pay substantial dollars to present to Angel investors. Brad Feld is an entrepreneur, turned Angel and VC, who is very entrepreneur centric and has a widely read blog (that’s where we found this).
This video is 2 hours long but the first 90 minutes are really worth listening to. It covers these topics:
By VStart, on January 14th, 2010
The Sacramento Angels, together with the Sierra Angels, led a multi-million dollar financing for San Francisco web annotation startup company, Reframe It. They were joined by other regional angel groups and individual angels. You can read the web press release here, and see another report of the financing gathered, in part, from the filing with the SEC of Form D here.
There are a couple of interesting points for entrepreneurs about this financing. First, you can see that to raise this kind of money from Angels, it takes a lead (the lead negotiates the Read More »»
By VStart, on November 2nd, 2009
Many startups with high growth ambitions immediately think of raising money from angels or VCs. This can be challenging for first time entrepreneurs, and if family and friends money is not an alternative, then the choices left are often credit cards or bootstrapping. Here is a post on the top 10 lessons in bootstrapping from VentureBeat.
There are two ways to build a business: Raise a bunch of money or bootstrap. When I was in business school, there wasn’t much attention given to the bootstrapping notion. The “MBA way” of growing a business is to write a business plan, raise money and then execute the business plan. But I think that’s almost always the wrong approach.
We bootstrapped Infusionsoft for several years before ever raising capital. The lessons we learned were, and continue to be, invaluable. Here are the top ten lessons we learned from this method – and why I continue to evangelize bootstrapping to entrepreneurs: … Read More » »
By VStart, on July 9th, 2009
There are many sites, documents and videos on the web about pitching a startup to investors. Here is one video that stands out. It is by David Rose, an angel investor, and serial entrepreneur. He is also the founder of Angelsoft (the platform used by most angel groups to manage entrepreneur applications, and deal flow).
Hope you enjoy it!
