I’m not the first to say that companies, whether they are startups or not, should not put all their efforts into pursuing investment so I’m not going to claim that. However it’s never been more (important and *easy* to:
1. Start
2. Build a product someone wants (some *one* – so just build it for one person)
3. Put a price on that product
4. Make some profit
I want to see the following trend in startups – they should have an awesome team and MVP so therefore get some seed funding fairly easily. This could be 3Fs, a Start-Up Loan, an EIS/SEID round of £100k or so, it doesn’t matter. Then investment should not be part of their lives until *at least three* big-shot VCs come to them with term sheets in order to really scale that business so many, many others can benefit.
It’s hardly a revolution but there are too many ‘needy’ startups chasing investment from pompous VCs with their heads in some 10 year old world. Get real folks – if you want to sell to 1m people for a tenner, then do so. If you want to make something and only sell to 10 people for £1m each then do that. Don’t wait to be picked – choose yourself.
Matthew Stafford @mstafford 