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if it takes 24 months, how do you convince investors to fund those 24 months of searching, before you can show any meaningful numbers?

adventured 8y ago
The same way it has always worked if you're going to exist on an investor's money: reputation and qualifications. A bit of luck helps as well. Reputation of course involves things such as your past work experience, your past VC experience, past outcomes, who you've networked with that might refer you to an investor, and so on. This is largely about what you've done and how it forms the opinion of others. Qualifications is what skills you possess, what you've accomplished, your education, your personal history, etc. This deeply ties into reputation. You can claim to be the greatest programmer ever, that's going to be incredibly difficult to verify for most venture capitalists, most basically won't bother attempting to verify it: they're going to judge you by reputation, partially in tandem with your claims.
tibbetts 8y ago
You can and should show meaningful numbers while searching. And you should probably do some of your 24 months and numbers before you quit your day job and ask for money. “We talked to 15 friendly CIOs at mid sized banks, and they all said that pen theft was a top three problem for them in 2018, they plan to budget up to $30k to solve it in 2019. We are pretty sure we can build RFID pen tracking systems for under $100 per pen, but we haven’t figured out how to price it for our market. I do know two bank branch managers who are willing to run beta tests.” I mean, that’s still a dumb idea, but you can get started putting numbers around something without running down the whole 24 month clock. And usually most of the risk is in the product market fit, not in your tech team’s ability to create pen trackers. Edit to add: now, if you integrate blockchain into your pen trackers, and have an ICO for pencoin, then this is totally fundable. Mid sized retail banks are definitely looking for a way to spend money on blockchain.

adventured 8y ago

The same way it has always worked if you're going to exist on an investor's money: reputation and qualifications. A bit of luck helps as well. Reputation of course involves things such as your past work experience, your past VC experience, past outcomes, who you've networked with that might refer you to an investor, and so on. This is largely about what you've done and how it forms the opinion of others. Qualifications is what skills you possess, what you've accomplished, your education, your personal history, etc. This deeply ties into reputation. You can claim to be the greatest programmer ever, that's going to be incredibly difficult to verify for most venture capitalists, most basically won't bother attempting to verify it: they're going to judge you by reputation, partially in tandem with your claims.

tibbetts 8y ago

You can and should show meaningful numbers while searching. And you should probably do some of your 24 months and numbers before you quit your day job and ask for money. “We talked to 15 friendly CIOs at mid sized banks, and they all said that pen theft was a top three problem for them in 2018, they plan to budget up to $30k to solve it in 2019. We are pretty sure we can build RFID pen tracking systems for under $100 per pen, but we haven’t figured out how to price it for our market. I do know two bank branch managers who are willing to run beta tests.” I mean, that’s still a dumb idea, but you can get started putting numbers around something without running down the whole 24 month clock. And usually most of the risk is in the product market fit, not in your tech team’s ability to create pen trackers. Edit to add: now, if you integrate blockchain into your pen trackers, and have an ICO for pencoin, then this is totally fundable. Mid sized retail banks are definitely looking for a way to spend money on blockchain.