Follow-up on my Crowdfunding post. For a great truth-is-better-than-fiction story on the dark and crazy side of crowdfunding, check out the Bloomberg article “Crowdfunding and the Greatest Investment Opportunity EVER!!!” In a deliciously ironic twist, a Florida entrepreneur (or a cynic with a great sense of humor) posted a solicitation for an “atomic water engine” investment opportunity. Where did they post it? On the SEC website in the section reserved for comments on the new crowdfunding rules. Few choice snippets from Rocketjet’s hilarious pitch: [Read more…]
Archives for April 2012
Crowdfunding: You Cannot Make This Stuff Up!
April 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment
VC Investing: Are the Lines Starting to Converge?
April 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Michael Greeley of Flybridge just wrote an interesting post in PEHub about the new VC industry data released by NVCA, Thompson Reuters & PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Well worth a read. Gist of his post is that the VC industry is continuing to consolidate and he thinks we are seeing several things as a result: a focus on near term liquidity (chasing late stage deals), a flight from highly regulated and long time frame industries, and most interesting to me, a claimed end of what he calls the “Great Seed Experiment” – a theme he has noted for some time: “the VC industry is at risk of having created too many “me too” companies, and with less capital to invest across the board, many seed entrepreneurs will be deeply saddened when they come back to market for their Early round…” Few key excerpts from his post are below; original worth a read. [Read more…]
Kick-Starting the Make Economy
April 18, 2012 by 3 Comments
Adrian Gonzalez, a third party logistics (3PL) expert and friend of ScratchPaper, has written an excellent follow-up piece to my post Why Angels Chase Electrons. In the piece (Entrepreneurs, 3PLs, and Angel Investors: Kick-starting the Make Economy), Adrian points out that, while it is true that manufactured products still involve more capital than software products, the gap is narrowing every day. Because of the increasing ease of working with contract manufacturers, logistics service providers and out-sourcing all sorts of non-core activities, manufacturing-oriented companies are more capital efficient than ever these days. He makes some excellent points. The days of every company needing to be good at everything are over. Are you doing enough to leverage best-of-breed contract partners for the non-core aspects of your business?
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If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy: What I Look For In An Entrepreneur, Are Entrepreneurs Wild Risk-Takers?, Top 20 Dos & Don’ts with Angel Groups & Early Stage Financing, Delusional Economics, The Overture, That Vision Thing, The Power of An Advisory Board, Loch Ness, Unicorns & The First-Mover Advantage, Should I Wait For A Technical Co-Founder.
Subscribe – To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe to the RSS feed here, or to receive them via email enter your address in the box in the upper right or go here and enter your email address in the box in the upper right. You can also follow me on Twitter @cmirabile and on Google+.
The Frank Peters Show
April 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment
It was payback time recently for me; Frank Peters wanted his chance to turn the tables and interview me on his show. Since he had been good enough to do a video interview with me a while back (here), and because he is a great guy, I said sure, why not. We had a great chat about the angel and early stage ecosystem, crowd-funding and what the future may hold. Tip of the hat to Frank for the excellent library of work he has built up on the show over the years. It’s Show #372; listen to it via Stream, flash player or iTunes
Comments, questions or reactions to this post? Leave a note below and I will respond to your questions.
If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy: Thoughts on Crowdfunding, Pattern Matching Can Cause Blindspots, Getting Off The Ground; Early Formation Economics, Why Angels Chase Electrons, Delusional Economics, That Vision Thing, Loch Ness, Unicorns & The First-Mover Advantage, Are Entrepreneurs Wild Risk-Takers?, Top 20 Dos & Don’ts with Angel Groups & Early Stage Financing, What I Look For In An Entrepreneur, The Overture, Pick Your Founder/Co-Investors Carefully & Reflections on the Nature of Entrepreneurs, Should I Wait For A Technical Co-Founder?, When Do You Need My Slide Deck?, and 20 Bootstrapping Ideas.
Subscribe – To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe to the RSS feed here, or to receive them via email enter your address in the box in the upper right or go here and enter your email address in the box in the upper right. You can also follow me on Twitter @cmirabile and on Google+.
Basil Peters – Angel Video Interview Series
April 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment
[This post is part of an on-going series of video interviews with members of the start-up community – see a list of links to the full series here.]
With the possible exception of Eric Ries (The Lean Start-Up), no one has had a greater impact on angel investors’ current thinking than Basil Peters, who has been preaching the gospel of “early exits” tirelessly for the last several years. (It’s obvious I am a disciple in some situations when you read a post of mine like Why Angels Chase Electrons). Basil quite literally wrote the book on this topic (it’s called Early Exits) and he is a frequent, and excellent, speaker and advisor on the subject. He is also a terrifically nice guy and a true gentleman (or maybe it is just that he is Canadian), so it was an absolute pleasure to interview him for my video interview series. [Read more…]
Lessons From the Start-Up Genome Project
April 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Stanford & Berkeley entrepreneurship professor Steve Blank did an excellent write-up about the new report published by Startup Genome Project (report here; free registration required). I want to call attention to Steve’s write-up because it is fun reading in terms of the crazy origins of the project. And the report itself is a must-read for every entrepreneur and early-stage investor out there, but as a teaser,
here are fourteen of the key conclusions reached by phase one of the study in looking at 650 very early stage web companies: [Read more…]