If you’ve ever thought about adding an advisor to your startup or you’ve NEVER thought about it because you don’t know what value they can provide, read this presentation. It’s a great intro and answers a lot of questions you probably never thought to ask.
It’s not pretty, but it’s an effective presentation.
| — | Rob May, “What I Learned Raising A Million Dollars For a Startup With No Business Plan and No Financial Projections (While Drinking a Beer)” |
Click the link (brown box, white type above) to see more, but here are immediate deadlines:
SproutBox - March 1
i/o Ventures - March 1
YCombinator - March 3
Startl - March 15
Tech Wildcatters - March 19
Techstars, Boulder - March 22
Dreamit Ventures - March 22
Betaspring - March 22
*Thanks to David Weisburd for showing me the link
Provides a great outline in short order. Also see Part I of this series: Elevator Pitch
This is a thorough, yet brief post on how to raise money from Angels and other seed investors. It gives very tangible advice. If you’re in this stage of your startup (which we are at Pocket Tales), you can start using this information immediately.
ExactTarget continues to be Indianapolis’ premier darling. Even the location of their offices on Monument Circle, the heart of downtown, is the perfect analogy for the position they hold in the Indianapolis tech community.
As much as I look up to and try to emulate ExactTarget, I think too often their success is used as proof that the Indianapolis startup community is thriving.
As this Indianapolis Business Journal article jokes, the Indianapolis tech community didn’t get ExactTarget back in 2000: “They couldn’t even raise $1 million,” recalled Kidd, now a senior vice president at Indianapolis-based Walker Research, who admits to scratching his head at just what the entrepreneurs were proposing to do back then.”
What I wonder is, has this mentality really changed? If ExactTarget started today, and email marketing was just as much a new concept as it was back in 2000, would it have an easier time getting funded?
There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about Indianapolis, but the vitality of a startup community is proven by the accomplishments of…well, startups. ExactTarget hasn’t been a startup for 9 years.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the MAN who is actually IN THE ARENA, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt, CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC, “The Man in the Arena”
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