2. A Little Background On Me Choose Your Own Adventure Bootstrapping FFF (Friends, Family, Fools) Angel Financing Venture Capital How We Did It At Infochimps What You Can Do Q & A Agenda
3. CollegeBoxes Raised $1 million in friends and family Angel investor and advisor Sold assets to Store to Door JDspace Bootstrapped CEO/Co-Founder Sold some assets to Small World Labs Andrews Kurth Represented 25 startups in raising over $250 million* *1 outlier, did a $100 million Series A raise during the bubble Infochimps Raised $375,000 in angel financing and $1.25 million in VC CEO/Co-Founder A little background on me
5. You don’t need money No salaries No office Free(mium) software Cloud hosting Zero marketing spend Oh, you really do need money? Consulting on the side, but not the other way around Vendor financing Receivables financing Credit cards and bank debt Can you cash flow before you go broke? If not, quit now If you are stubborn, go to next slide Bootstrapping
6. Who is the fool? If you think your [____] is annoying now… No expectation of being repaid is a myth You have to live with these people the rest of your life Make sure they are accredited $1 million in net assets excluding residence; or $200K/yr for single filer or $300K/year for joint filers If not, rescission, which could come out of your pocket! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAuSTQUa3tM (A Bronx Tale clip NSFW) FFF (Friends, Family, fools)
7. Distinguished from FFF Regularly make investments in private companies Might provide additional value; more than dumb money Angels with LPs (“super angels”) are really more like VCs Where are these angels? AngelList (http://angel.co) Your network! Ask for advice, not money! Raising $ from respected angels signals VCs Raise $ in convertible debt so it is nice and clean for VCs Don’t even try raising VC if you can’t raise angel financing Angel Financing
8. Be self aware, are you really VC fundable? Raising VC does not come without costs Raising VC is easy if you’ve built and sold a company for millions of dollars Oh, you haven’t? Get the right intro Start local, but go west Appear bigger than you are Sell your stock, not your product Get to a partner at the right time Venture Capital
10. Join Quora Subscribe to TechCrunchRSS Attend startup meetups Attend SXSWi Work at a startup Get domain expertise in something Build something small (2taps.com) Start a personal board of advisors What you can do