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"You need three things: formidable founders, a promising market, and (usually) some evidence of success so far." Evidence of success often makes the first two

• mindcrime 13y ago
  Where this whole thing breaks down, though, is where you need more money than you can self-fund, to get to that point of having some evidence of success so far. In theory, the whole point of "seed stage" capital is to take a company who aren't at that point yet, and get them there, where they can leverage that success to either grow organically, get acquired, or attract additional investment. But these days, would-be "seed stage" investors are acting more like VCs looking at an A round. Everybody seems to have become incredibly risk averse, and acts like they've forgotten the "high risk" part of the expression "high risk, high reward". Now to be fair, I'm speaking from an East Coast perspective, and I understand the investors here tend to be more risk averse than their West Coast counterparts. But from the sounds of this, this mindset may be spreading. Oh well, at least, in our case, we aren't trying to raise money (yet) anyway. Our goal is to self-fund as far as possible and only raise outside money if we absolutely have to.