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Both of you seem to conflate seed stage and growth stage, where the latter is generally series A and beyond. The below reflects enterprise, and probably in som

Both of you seem to conflate seed stage and growth stage, where the latter is generally series A and beyond. The below reflects enterprise, and probably in some form, consumer: 1. Seed stage is likely before growable revenue. This may still be an idea. If technology advances are involved, not just a CMS to power PoF (think university startups vs. most Y Combinators), there may be real capital costs (time, equipment, enterprise POC cycles, ...) before there's something growable. This is also known as turning a technical invention into an adopted innovation. A $500K-$2M seed grant for an AI/infrastructure/etc. company would often need that. Without it, they could only really innovate on stapling together other people's technology. 2. In growth stage, there's a link between money spent on sales + marketing + field engineers and generated revenue, and likely, adding bells & whistles to grow into nearby markets. At this point, first mover advantage gets pretty real. Even cooler, revenue should be predictable within some range, so as soon as sales KPIs aren't being hit, hiring etc. can be scaled back to reflect reality. Or, just keep growing because the market is worth it. In both cases, the goal is to go big fast, e.g., world leader in 3-7 years, vs. the 5-10 year plan. This isn't necessarily about greed: dealing with competitive industry, the desire to work on big things, the desire to work on many things, hiring certain folks, etc. Of course, if you can do all of the above with a PoF idea, great. However, if you're that good, maybe just pick the right numbers for lottery tickets and use the proceeds to start a research lab? :)

graycat 10y ago
> 1. Seed stage is likely before growable revenue. In which case from all I can tell, essentially no VC in the country will pay any attention at all. That is, the startup didn't have traction significant and growing rapidly. For university startups, okay, but have to look in detail at the project plans. As I mentioned, that's possible: E.g., the first version of GPS was a back of the envelope thing by some guys at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. That envelope was converted to a project plan; the plan was executed and successful. Lesson: If look carefully, should be able to evaluate the project technology just on paper long before soft/hardware or traction. If the technology really is overwhelmingly powerful for some commercial need, then, sure, should have a successful company. But IT VCs won't look at the details and, instead, just want to look at traction. For funding of on-going companies, sure, there is a big industry for that from later stage VCs, private equity, M&A, IPOs, etc. There to evaluate a company, make heavy use of accountants and lawyers.

graycat 10y ago

> 1. Seed stage is likely before growable revenue. In which case from all I can tell, essentially no VC in the country will pay any attention at all. That is, the startup didn't have traction significant and growing rapidly. For university startups, okay, but have to look in detail at the project plans. As I mentioned, that's possible: E.g., the first version of GPS was a back of the envelope thing by some guys at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. That envelope was converted to a project plan; the plan was executed and successful. Lesson: If look carefully, should be able to evaluate the project technology just on paper long before soft/hardware or traction. If the technology really is overwhelmingly powerful for some commercial need, then, sure, should have a successful company. But IT VCs won't look at the details and, instead, just want to look at traction. For funding of on-going companies, sure, there is a big industry for that from later stage VCs, private equity, M&A, IPOs, etc. There to evaluate a company, make heavy use of accountants and lawyers.