And for anyone with a decent idea and the drive to start a company, $100,000 to get it off the ground is easy to come by.
Bullshit. Out of the thousands of people that come to Hackers & Founders on any given month, I know exactly one person who has been able to raise money on an idea alone. And, that young woman is an absolutely an exceptional sales person.
I should know. Hackers & Founders _is_ early stage in Silicon Valley.
We boot strapped an incubator at Hackers & Founders because it is so friggin hard to get funded. Myself, my co founders and everyone in the incubator worked their assess off to get our 6 startups funded. The companies that we were working with all had polished products, had been working on their projects for at least a year or two.
And, yeah, 7 weeks after we were done, all 6 of our companies have raised a total of $1.5M. But, it took these companies at least 6 months of pitching and hard work to raise a round.
And, in that same time, we've gained 800 members at Hackers and Founders. How long to you think it's going to take those people to raise?
edit
We aren't raising money from Limited Partners because being mini-VC's isn't interesting at all to us. What's interesting to us is helping the thousands of our members globally learn how to start kick ass startups. And, we want to give them the tools to do just that. And, when they're ready, we'll connect them with the investment community.
So, we've talked with perhaps 30 VC's over the past 6 months about sponsoring what we're doing... Every single one has passed.
Bubble? If this was the bubble that the NYT is talking about, VC's and angels would be throwing money at us.
Bullshit. Out of the thousands of people that come to Hackers & Founders on any given month, I know exactly one person who has been able to raise money on an idea alone. And, that young woman is an absolutely an exceptional sales person.
I should know. Hackers & Founders _is_ early stage in Silicon Valley.
We boot strapped an incubator at Hackers & Founders because it is so friggin hard to get funded. Myself, my co founders and everyone in the incubator worked their assess off to get our 6 startups funded. The companies that we were working with all had polished products, had been working on their projects for at least a year or two.
And, yeah, 7 weeks after we were done, all 6 of our companies have raised a total of $1.5M. But, it took these companies at least 6 months of pitching and hard work to raise a round.
And, in that same time, we've gained 800 members at Hackers and Founders. How long to you think it's going to take those people to raise?
edit
We aren't raising money from Limited Partners because being mini-VC's isn't interesting at all to us. What's interesting to us is helping the thousands of our members globally learn how to start kick ass startups. And, we want to give them the tools to do just that. And, when they're ready, we'll connect them with the investment community.
So, we've talked with perhaps 30 VC's over the past 6 months about sponsoring what we're doing... Every single one has passed.
Bubble? If this was the bubble that the NYT is talking about, VC's and angels would be throwing money at us.