Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The Best Way To Deal With Venture Capitalists

An assortment of United States coins, includin...Image via WikipediaVCs are money people. And many entrepreneurs fall for that stereotype. VCs are not rich people - well, many are - but my point is VCs are not big money people who are itching to get rid of the money that is, oh, such a burden on them. VCs are entrepreneurs themselves. They go raise money. They raise money promising to grow that money. The good ones do. The best ones grow the money like money were raining from trees. If you put that first 100K into a company like Google, you see a growth that is better than any winning lottery ticket ever.

There are many, many VCs out there. There are many, many, many would be tech entrepreneurs out there. As an entrepreneur you should not need money. You should be able to generate revenues and profits.

So why go look for VC money? The only thing VC money does for you is it buys you time. Ultimately you have to generate your own revenues and profits. You can postpone that by taking VC money, but you can not postpone that forever. And the great VCs know that.

VCs are visionaries, or they have to be. They have to be able to see the future. They have to be able to see five years out. They have to see that a company that is not making any or much money now will make truck loads of money in a few years.

I have never doubted Tumblr will make truck loads of money. The last batch of VCs who put tens of millions into Tumblr, I did not think they were fools. But Tumblr is not making much if any money now. A good VC is able to see that that is not a problem.

If your company is going to go down - and that happens - then you should not be surprised VCs are leery of you. If your company is never going to generate anything, let alone revenues, then VCs are going to be leery of you.

Can you build a real business? Can you generate revenues and profits? Can you grow those revenues and profits fast? Can you scale it up?

The best way to be an entrepreneur is to have the capacity to build a real business. An entrepreneur generates revenues and profits. If you can do that, even if you need VC money, you will not be looking to suck on mother's breasts forever. And that is a good thing.

The best way to deal with venture capitalists is by not needing their money. The second best way is by needing their money only temporarily.
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1 comment:

Jack Reylan said...

People who take linkedin and facebook seriously deserve to suffer serious career damage. Social networks are for social retards. They are brought to you my aghadhimmics whose patron saint was Walt Whitman, the guy who only had sex with himself and believed in the Gnostic Gospels. Those who use lint tin and futz book are narcissist masochist clowns governed by affectation. Is a vulture capitalist who only invests in firms which appear as friends of friends really exercising the fiduciary responsibility he is paid for? Do we forget a quarter century ago these banksters patted themselves on the back that firing Steve Jobs was the right thing to do? Or when Gerry Carmen's GSA foisted IBM mainframes on everyone in the government just as the PC and interactive computing were dawning? Or when they relied on the witchcraft of technical analysis instead of the hard work of market fundamental, stealing instead of inventing even that, and concentrating more on the imitation than substance, causing the markets to crash? Or banksters who shell game inconsistent products, shifting fees and agreements by surprise, because their autopilot brains were unable to comprehend what real service is? How can you trust people who submit to urban vermin affectations instead of genuine reality? Given how such fads ran amok in the recent crisis, such individuals should be denied serious employment in the future. Social networking is a bubble that needs to be shut down before it bankrupts all of us. That’s why all the idiot hedge funds donated to Obama!