This isn’t really my thoughts, since I just woke up and don’t have the energy for thoughts. But, there’s been some more talk on this over the last few days, and I wanted to highlight some of the interesting bits.
Rick Segal posted a more detailed entry on some of his thoughts. James Cox had a really great response from the entrepreneur’s standpoint, as did as did “Hank” (he can’t find funding for his great idea).
There are a few things going on here. First, James is right that part of the misconception amongst A Listers is that many of the people they know who are building these services have enough money that they are able to take 3-6 months off and build a product. Which is fine if a) you can afford to take the time off, b) you are able to personally build and c) you have the blog connections necessary to bring in decent traffic.
But that’s just the old guard approach. What about new guys like Hank and James who don’t need a lot of money (my guess is that 50-250K would go a long way… I know it would towards b5media).
Doc Searls feels this is really about pre-user testing and acceptance, before any funding (or something). Not sure I agree, as I never really bought into the “a small pool of users will accurately be able to predict what a large group will want” philosophy.
And I like James’ idea about starting a mini thinktank. This was one of the things I could see happening in response to this.
To finish off this summary post, here is my comment to Rick’s idea generating:
I wrote some of my response to this in my post yesterday, but I believe the key values that I and most of my entrepreneur friends (who, admittedly, aren’t the Robert Scoble’s and Mark Evans’ of the world, but we still have a lot of fun in spite of that) are looking for from VC’s are:
1. Support: In spite of our egos, we’re all very aware of what we do and don’t know. And most of us have somehow learned that “play to your strengths” is a great mantra. We just don’t know who to turn to for our areas of weakness.
2. Knowledge: One of the areas that isn’t a “strength” for this new generation of entrepreneur is knowledge. Sure, we have lots of head knowledge, but the experiential, stand-alongside mentor type knowledge is missing, and most of us want this from investors / VC’s.
3. Training: I touched on this in the post, but training new entrepreneurs is, to me, absolutely essential. In addition, running training as “camps” would allow entrepreneurs to develop relationships with each other early on, which is sure to help the VC / early stage investment firm in the long term.
4. Connections: Yes, blogging is a rolodex. But, getting beyond that rolodex is still very hard. Getting ad deals with newscorps, content partnerships with MSN and Yahoo, etc, is still a lot of hard work. Hard work that the relationships VC’s have can mitigate.
5. Money: Not much, and not too much all at once, but in the right hands, it’s amazing what 50-100K can do these days. In truth, many of my entrepreneur friends are asking for 3-5M$ these days because they have to. Sure, the investment looks good to VC’s and many of my friends are getting that funding. But they know that they could have done just as much with 1/10 of what they received. Strategic funding.This is a great discussion. I’m doing a lot of travelling in the next few months (Rochester, Toronto, Vancouver, San Fran) and I’m hoping to continue having this discussion with entrepreneurs, business managers and whoever else I bump into.
At the end of the day, though, I believe you either need to choose between changing everything and changing just a few things. Changing just a few things, in my mind, is far more likely to succeed. I know Dave wants to change everything, though, and I’ve never been one to stand in Dave’s way
Later on today I’m going to try and look at this from a different perspective. Right now the only way I can see this issue is on these 5 principles, but that’s largely because I’m looking at it with an entrepreneurs hat on. I’ll try and look at the industry sidelong in the next few days to see if there are some different trends that can be answered, capitalized on, etc.
After all, it doesn’t do any good for me to stand in my little corner of the web just yelling out the same idea over and over again!
#1 by Doc Searls - January 30th, 2006 at 14:28
I didn’t say ” this is really about pre-user testing and acceptance”. I said, “Here’s another observation. Not ever developer is a born entrepreneur, or even wants to be called one. Sometimes a good idea is a good idea, and just needs some help getting its ball rolling into the world…” That was one observation near the end of a long post that vetted various ideas from various people.
Not a big deal. Just wanted to point out that I think lots of ideas, baked to different degrees, need support. And that I agree with everybody in this conversation that we Something New. I suspect, by the way, that it will be more than one thing. Many approaches, in fact.
Also, I don’t think Dave wants to change everything. He does want to turn venture funding upside down, though. Which I think is a good, and also fun, idea.
If your travels take you by Satna Barbara, by the way, stop by.