Why ‘Until’-scripts lead to startup death…

Unless you have heard of Transactional Analysis (‘TA’), you probably don’t know that an “until script” is a behaviour (anti-)pattern with the (somewhat damaged) subtext “I can’t be happy until [insert unrealistic condition here]”. Basically, this is a fake justification people use on themselves to try to avoid taking responsibility for their own happiness, e.g.

• “I can’t be happy until I get some kind of parental approval” – just about every child ever
• “I can’t be happy until I get to the end of my degree course” – just about every student ever
• “I can’t be happy until this project has finished” – just about every programmer ever
• “I can’t get a proper contract until my probation period ends” – just about every employee ever
• “We cannot prosper without an extended period of austerity first” – just about every government in 2012

Of course, you don’t have to dig very deep to find the entrepreneur version of all this…

• “My startup can’t prosper until it gets funding“

I suspect that this points to something deeply broken in the contemporary entrepreneurial psyche. For at heart, the damaged emotional neediness of pitching for angel funding is nothing less than a über-until-script, i.e. Entrepreneur X can’t be happy until he/she has put together a funding round.

At its most excruciatingly awful, then, entrepreneurs pitching to business angels are pretty much on a par with unhappy children trying increasingly desperate measures to get attention from grossly neglectful parents. Realistically, in neither case is there a strong likelihood of a heart-warming outcome: however hopeful or optimistic you may be, positive thinking ain’t going to shift that particular mountain.

So… if “until scripts” (such as pitching for funding) aren’t any good, what’s the alternative?

Well, I think all of this points to one simple (yet brutally unfashionable and no less hard to swallow) truth: that any business plan that involves raising funding as a necessary step to operating success is inherently broken. Bust. Cracked. Dead In The Water. NBG.

Rather, the best paths to business success all steer their primary routes through self-reliance and customer-focused organic growth – your primary focus should be on building modestly self-sustaining businesses, yet ones that also have the capacity and vision to grow and scale rapidly in a best-case scenario. Is this do-able? Gosh, yes! But you’ll first need to unlearn the business school “lesson” that external funding is the only way to build a successful business – when in fact, it may well be the worst.

Hardware is apparently the new software (at long last!)

The New York Times just ran an article discussing all manner of neat hardware startups, a fair few of which I already knew well (Nest, Lytro, Raspberry Pi), but quite a few I hadn’t heard of before (Pebble, Bilibot, Electric Imp, LittleBits, Ouya, etc). The conclusion, of course, is that Hardware Is The New Software, and that Venture Capitalists are getting superexcited about this trend.

Well… it’s a great theory, but unless you’ve got an unbelievably sci-fi pitch (like Pebble, whose core idea of a totally programmable watch I remember first proposing to a VC friend a whole decade ago), building your company up to the stage that you can sensible go looking for scale-up funding [which is what almost all VC investment has now become] is a particularly hard trawl, with very few angels wanting to take that road with you.

However… it struck me while reading the article that even though the hardware development cost curve would appear from the outside to be trending towards zero, this is almost entirely as a result of a systemic realignment within the development / design world away from traditional custom dev systems and towards low-cost tools. For example, I shudder to think how many USB dev tools lie scattered around my workspace – oscilloscopes, logic probes, Bus Pirates, RS485 interfaces, wireless adapters, phone interfaces, etc. Hence this is not a zero-trend, this is merely shifting from an older development paradigm to another newer one. Hardware development will remain resolutely non-zero for a loooong time (and let’s not get into the issue of CE & UL testing, ok?)

As for 3d printing, people have been using this for prototyping for well over a decade now, but the big difference these days lies in the scale of the usage and the wider range of materials that are available to print in (i.e. not just compromised low-end ABS). Yet even so, the real world of plastic manufacturing continues to move ever further away – a typical industrial device (such as my security camera) uses a whole symphony of different plastics to achieve both functionality and reliability, and new materials are introduced all the time.

The real hardware revolution will start when we can print injection moulds in our garages… but though I famously pitched that to the Tech City LaunchPad1 competition, nobody seems interested (as my ‘Zoe’ avatar says at the end, “no chance – next time stick to social media, ok?”) It’s only a trillion dollar industry, why should anyone want to invest in anything so pathetically small? 🙂 But once again, the chances would seem high that I’ve arrived at a great party seven years too soon, as per bl&^dy normal… oh well. 😦

Incidentally, one of the NYT article’s authors is the very affable John Markoff, who also writes about historical cryptography, one of my parallel passions (in case you don’t already know).

Startups 3.0, The Lean Startup, and business angels…

OK, as with nearly all blog posts, the following is an outrageously reductionist simplification. But for all that, it remains a genuine and honestly held point of view that might just change the way you look at things…

Essentially, I believe that the modern financing history of “startups” divides into three overlapping generations or waves:-

• “Startups 1.0” were bank-funded, back in the days when banks had money to lend.
• “Startups 2.0” were angel-funded, back in the days when angels had both wealth and liquidity.
• “Startups 3.0” are self-funded, trying hard to move to customer-funded at high velocity.

Right now, I think that most startups are stuck in a limbo between 2.0 and 3.0 – we’re smart enough to see lots of practical problems with angel funding, but not self-confidently ambitious enough to honestly believe that we can bootstrap what we do from basically nothing all the way to a billion dollar company without angels’ alleged assistance. My advice? Have faith – you can do it, honestly you can. All you need to do is to devise a way of making it happen. Given that you solve every other problem you run into, why not try to solve that one too?

Interestingly, one common reaction to my popular post Lean Startups suck. Here are 10 reasons why… is that I must be some kind of Lean Hater. In fact, the single biggest thing I hate is seeing clever, ingenious and otherwise well-informed people suckered into following a course of action that will suck every last penny out of their pockets (and often out of their friends’ and families’ pockets too).

Unfortunately, I believe that this is what Lean will do to you if you trust it for financing. Angels don’t ‘get’ Lean, simply because Lean startups are encouraged not to make claims or promises that might have value, whereas angels are fundamentally looking for things of value to invest in. So the core issue I have with Lean is simply that we’re living in the decade before angels find a way – a ‘contract of mutual expectation’, if you like – of coping with Lean. In short, we don’t (and indeed we may never) have Lean Angels. That would be “Startups 4.0”, but we’re a long way from there just yet. 😦

Overlaying Lean onto the three startup financing generations described above, my argument would be that Lean conflates the two very different dynamics of Startups 2.0 and Startups 3.0, but ends up with the worst features of both. That is, Lean promotes the emerging incremental self-funded-to-customer-funded mindset (of Startups 3.0) but tied up with the need to expensively surrender control of most of your company to angels in order to scale (of Startups 2.0). It’s not a good mix at all.

But… “what’s so wrong with angels?“, you may ask. The awful truth is that here in 2012 we’re living at the tail end of the angel funding revolution: over the last decade, angels’ thinking has become so polluted by the “10x home-run” nonsense spouted by VCs (who have since moved en masse to far later-stage investments anyway) that angels’ overall level of ambition, expectation and – let’s face it – raw greed have all been inflated beyond the ability of any genuine startup to meet them, except purely on a vapourware or slideware level.

Lean does not fix this: in fact, Lean promotes angel funding at a time when the gap between startups and mainstream angels is widening year on year. I dramatized all that here back in 2010 as the Venn diagrams of death (and the world is still waiting for virtual angels), so it’s not exactly shocking news… but it seems to me that very few entrepreneurs get any of this at all. Don’t mind me, though, please feel free to carry on drinking that angel Koolaid all you like. As I said when I got cut up by a hearse the other day, “whatever, it’s your funeral“.

I know that bookshop shelves are filled with zippily-titled easy ways to start up your company (of which Eric’s book is merely one of many), but the reality is that these simply don’t work any more. In business terms, they’re all as outdated as 18th century encyclopaedias. They promote a gospel of financing harmony and collaborational positivity that simply doesn’t match the East End barrow-boy hustle that actually passes for angel investment.

Ultimately, I believe that the only genuine way that people can deliver the kind of low-risk-yet-hockey-stick-shaped returns angels demand is through armed robbery or Enron-scale fraud. So go ahead, pitch all you like, knock yourselves out: your so-called best case endgame scenario is that you’ll end up grinding out one ridiculous, abusively one-sided offer from a ragtag set of barely-liquid angels who will then be more interested in finding tricky ways of mitigating their downsides at your personal expense than in growing your splendid company together.

Alternatively, you can start small and find ways of getting to customers and growing fast. You know which option I recommend! 😉

The Sadness of Startups, and Pirate Bones…

People like to invest so much time looking at the upside of entrepreneurship that there isn’t really much of a vocabulary for the downsides: not only for the collapsed companies, but also for the sadness of startups that do get funded. Because of the lack of competition for deals, one dirty little secret here in the UK is that many startups get funded under such abusive terms that personal disaster for the entrepreneurs involved is almost inevitable. But nobody wants to mention that, let alone coin a phrase for it.

Anyway, one fine September 19th I held a party in my garden to celebrate International Speak Like a Pirate Day: and so went looking for pirate-themed music to entertain my guests. One track in particular – Pirate Bones by Natasha Bedingfield – really stood out for me, and has done ever more so as life in my shady corner of Startup Land has developed (I hesitate to say “progressed” with a straight face).

I couldn’t find correct lyrics for it anywhere on the Internet (and having written over 200 songs myself, I should point out that they’re technically high quality stuff), so here they are. Do they describe your experience as an entrepreneur?

Pirate Bones – Natasha Bedingfield
[From “Pocketful of Sunshine” (2007)]

What if I squeeze myself into any shape / And I still don’t fit?
What if I bend myself so much that I break / And I can’t mend it?
What if I burn so bright that the fire goes out / And I can’t stay lit?
What’s the point in it?

I could get good at crying crocodile tears / Just to get along
I could carry on telling you what you wanna hear / ’til my voice is gone
But if I finally get to the place that I think is home / And I don’t belong
What’s the point in it? / Where’s the benefit?
When I’m gaining all but I’m losing it

[Chorus:]
It’s not worth having / If it’s too much to hold
You can dig so deep / That you’re left with a hole
Thirsty in a desert with a bag full of gold
Don’t wanna end up like pirate bones
What I thought was treasure’s just a pile of stones
I might have had the treasure but I’d be laying alone
Just a pile of pirate bones
If I forfeit my soul it ain’t worth having
If it’s something I stole it ain’t worth having

What if I stake everything I am on a dream / And it’s counterfeit?
If I reach the end that justifies the means / Could I live with it?
And if it’s true that having too much of any good thing / Can only make me sick
What’s the point in it / Where’s the benefit
When I’m gaining all but I’m losing it

[Repeat Chorus]

It’s not worth that much to me / If losing out is what it means
To swim in shallow victory / Is empty, empty
It’s just not worth the price / It’s only a fool’s paradise
If it’s draining every drop of life till I’m dry like pirate bones

[Repeat Chorus]

The antidote to startup funding: customers!

I’ve just come back from being interviewed at an Innovation Warehouse meeting room by London OpenCoffee advice-meister Iqbal Gandham and ex-ZDNetter Andrew Swinton. Basically, they wanted to video my take on topics such as SEIS and startup funding, to act as a kind of antidote to the unwarranted ra-ra positivity that all too often fills the UK tech startup press.

It was a lot of fun to do, and I hope it does rapidly emerge onto the web in some form or other. Oh, and if you’re asking, I’m not bald, I get my hair cut that way. 🙂

Anyway, the big themes that emerged were:-

• For a ‘typical’ UK tech startup, the basic cost of getting funded – in terms of research, travel, lunches, networking, pay-to-prepare, pay-to-prepare, pay-to-succeed, legals, etc – as of 2012 is surely not far off £25K. Are you surprised? Appalled? Both?
• Worse still, the basic cost of not getting funded isn’t far off £15K, never mind the opportunity cost of that 9+ months of work you’ll never recoup. So… why not take your £15K – £25K and go out and do actual business with it instead?
• Look, presentations aren’t sexy. Pitch decks aren’t sexy. Elevator pitches aren’t sexy. The only sexy thing is having customers.
• Use your ingenuity and persistence to build up a real business, one brick at a time, where each brick is a customer.
• Being an entrepreneur is 90% sales, 10% everything else. Tech entrepreneurs use phrases like “virality” to kid themselves the proportions might be the other way round, but they’re simply not – and they never have been.
• So, unless you can actually demonstrate – to yourself, never mind to anyone else! – that you can sell stuff in the real world to real people, you’re basically a nontrepreneur. Yes, it’s a nasty, horrible word, for sure – but if thinking about it helps you to get real, then it’s also a bl*%dy great word.
• In a nutshell, work out what you’re selling, physically go out and meet people who want that kind of thing, and sell to them.
• Stop kidding yourself that tech trickery alone will be sufficient to get you to a huge market, it won’t.
• Forget about emulating Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and eBay – if their ‘secret recipe’ for success could be bottled, we’d all be drinking the stuff. But there is no secret, so it can’t, so we’re not. So get over it!

Probably not what you wanted to hear, but there you go, it is what it is! Live long and prosper! 🙂

The Unfundable Mountain…

The normal or Gaussian distribution has a bell-curve shape, one that should be familiar to nearly anyone who has been exposed to a little practical maths along the way: given that this is where ideas such as standard deviation ultimately come from, it’s a pretty crucial bit of conceptual kit to have access to (even bearing in mind its many limitations).

When I think about tech startups pitching for funding, I see this curve playing out its binomial magic in a painfully visual way:-

On the right-hand side here, what I am claiming is that only about 2% of tech startups are externally fundable – i.e. that it would genuinely make good business sense for angels to fund them. Which is not to say that 2% of startups get funded (they plainly don’t), or even that all the startups that get funded fall on the right side of that line (they plainly don’t)… in both cases, life isn’t that simple.

Similarly, on the left-hand side here what I am claiming is that only about 2% of tech startups can self-fund themselves – that they can reach their market and be self-sustainable without needing significant external funding to get them there. Which is not to say that this happens to all those companies, but rather that it could if their principals saw it as their best option, rather than putting all their money into chasing funding.

What this leaves in the middle is something terribly depressing – the unfundable mountain, the pile of startup proposals which don’t stand any real chance of working. Nearly every business school pitch you’ll see falls here, along with almost all high-concept business plans from any source. Some would also argue that anything with the word “virality” (or indeed “synergy“) probably deserves to go here too, and to be perfectly honest I’d find it quite hard to disagree with them.

So far, so depressingly pragmatic: but I think the curve has many more stories to tell. For example, I strongly suspect that a lot of UK business angels now spend their time looking for businesses that are on the wrong end of the curve – i.e. innately self-sustaining businesses that don’t need external cash, but whose principals have convinced themselves that they can only function with angel funding. The huge problem there is that the practical costs – in time, money, and just plain hassle – involved in getting funding can very well cause such companies to go bust in the short-to-medium term. Really, how can you call needing lots of money in order to get over the shock of being funded anything apart from disastrous?

Also: I suspect that many people don’t satisfactorily understand the implicit difference in strategy between the two ends. I think that the left-hand end is all about increasing the (reward/risk) ratio by reducing the risk part to nearly zero, while the right-hand end is all about increasing it by increasing the reward part hugely, making the perceived outcome too mouthwatering for angels to turn down.

What, then, does bootstrapping actually achieve? And how can you square this curve with the entire Lean Startup thing? And is “pivoting” anything but upgrading your startup’s ambition to a level so stratospheric that it makes angels nearly choke on their own saliva?

With my own startup, I used to think that the whole point of bootstrapping was to reduce the risks to the point that there wasn’t any good reason not to invest: and this is essentially what I spent five years doing. However, in retrospect it seems as though all this achieved was to inch my company closer to the left (unsexy) end of the curve, though never actually close enough to be self-sustaining. If I had wanted it to be externally funded, I perhaps should instead have focused on finding ways of upping its reward factor, making the proposition more aligned with the right (sexy) end of the curve.

Hence it could reasonably be said that the biggest lesson to be learned here is simply that startup funding is more about amplifying greed than assuaging fear, i.e. that when it comes to investing, greed trumps fear. Personally, I don’t know for sure that this is true: the hundreds of UK angels I’ve met over the past few years have such a wide variety of motivations and issues to do with money (not all of them good, and not all of them bad) that generalizing is always going to be problematic. But… maybe there is a seed of truth there. You decide!

The Colour of Money…

I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we in the UK tend to talk about investment. And it’s all to do with what I call “the colour of money”: but no, that’s not the 1986 sequel to “The Hustler” with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. It’s about the relative risk profile of individual investments relative to a market – or in economics terms, the beta.

You see, beta is (according to its Wikipedia page) “the volatility of an asset in relation to the volatility of the benchmark that said asset is being compared to“. Whatever form capital is held in, its owner holds it there relative to an external market benchmark – and if it fails to meet the expectations of that benchmark, its owner is likely to find a way to convert it into something more suitable.

Ultimately, each asset class (bonds, shares, property, gold, wines, commodities, tech startups, etc) has its own risk/reward profile – generally speaking, the greater the class’s beta (i.e. the greater the volatility of the class relative to, say, UK government bonds), the less predictable the outcome of holding it would be, and hence the higher the level of overall return an investor in that class would expect to receive in order to compensate it for the risk of holding its money in that particular form.

The absolute volatility of a given asset is called its sigma: what’s important here is that beta is a measure of relative volatility, which is a way of saying that your rational view of any given asset is strongly coloured by whatever benchmark you’re using to reckon it against.

Yet it’s rare (in my experience) for investors to radically change the asset class they invest in – that is, to change the colour of their money – because that also means radically changing the benchmark they measure success or failure against. And in some cases (e.g. pension funds) there are indeed rules that explicitly prevent them making riskier investments.

Hence the first big problem I’m flagging here is that we don’t really have anything like a credible benchmark for investing in startups. Which means that we can’t practically apply high-level rational investment strategies (such as beta) to investing in startups – pretty much everything you’ve learnt about investing in stocks is of only marginal value in the startup world. There are plenty of things wrong with beta (e.g. upside gains and downside risk are only ever equally accountable in academics’ graphs – everyone else has to worry about cashflow), but not having any kind of access to it makes startup investing practically problematic.

Moreover, the second big problem is that without any kind of benchmark, people can’t rationally move sideways from a different benchmark. This, I believe, is why we now have so many “latent angels” – people who like the idea of investing in startups and who would dearly like to, but whose cheque-writing hand remains somehow paralyzed by fear. No matter how many angel group meetings these latent angels attend, I suspect that the lack of credible industry benchmarks is a major factor in keeping their level of investment at zero.

The third big problem is that investment in startups isn’t even remotely scientific – it’s wide-boy, sharky territory (and here I’m specifically talking about the many cut-throat dealmakers masquerading as angels out there). Sure, angel gatekeepers and academics like to talk startup valuation up as a rationally priced deal based on opportunity and negotiation: but you need at least two bidders to make a market, and in practice I suspect few UK startups ever get more than a single offer on the table, particularly at seed stage.

For the tech entrepreneur, then, the UK (particularly London!) is a place where you’re surrounded by the wrong colour money. How likely is it that a self-described “business angel” who has made significant money out of some kind of financial services scam play will look to invest in a startup unless that startup closely matches his/her pre-existing money colour? Not likely at all, I think.

Review: “Confessions of an Entrepreneur” by Chris Robson…

At last! Chris Robson’s “Confessions of an Entrepreneur” (home page, Amazon page) is a book about specifically UK entrepreneurship I’m happy to recommend, particularly to those in the audience at my recent UCL lecture. Here’s a book that actually tries to deal with the raw emotional and social challenges sharply foregrounded by being an entrepreneur.

Of course, it’s far from perfect: more than a few of the entrepreneurs’ stories he draws upon to thicken up his personal narrative fall into the twin camps of “pub success theatre” and “stories from mates who’ve done well” (which, given that he went to Eton, occasionally fail to satisfy), rather than being genuinely challenging tales from the entrepreneurial bleeding edge. And even though Robson has tried to include structured lists as section takeaways, that isn’t enough to transform the book into a self-help guide to entrepreneurship. The most enjoyable – and useful – parts of “Confessions…” are those where he’s just talking about steering stuff while under duress from different angles.

Frankly, the big reason for buying this book is not that it is stuffed with Lean meat or business tricks to help you get your own startup going more easily (for it is actually at its worst when aspiring to the whole business self-help canon) but that its honesty about the real-life difficulties entrepreneurs face will surely help you feel a little less alone and stranded deep in the turbulent startup seas. And that is basically priceless! 😉

Jumping the octopus, and pivoting…

In TV reviewer jargon, a show is said to have jumped the shark when it starts adding in ridiculous things to make it interesting, in lieu of anything worthwhile happening to any of the characters, or in lieu of any decent story. The phrase derived from a late episode of “Happy Days”, when The Fonz waterski-jumped over a shark: it just reeked so badly of sad, arthritic desperation that it begat a phrase of its own.

So this week, when I finally caught up with an episode from the current series of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), now with Ted Danson at the helm, it was with great sadness that I saw the cast mugging it up around a sexual act involving a Japanese lady in a bath with an octopus. In bringing this to the screen, I think the CSI producers and writers managed to shark jump even further than The Fonz ever managed: in fact, this for me was the moment when CSI jumped the octopus, sad as it is to say.

Actually, I rather liked the first few series of CSI: just as with the pilot for the X-Files, all the themes and ideas that then played out over numerous seasons were present right from the start. But the central plot conceit that worked the best was the whole idea of pitching Grissom & Willows as Dad & Mom and the other CSIs as the children fighting for parental affection: it kind of asked the question “could a family work together?” Somehow that got lost in the haze when Grissom left the show: perhaps everyone forgot that that was what CSI was really all about.

All of which brings me to one hot issue in Startup Land: the dichotomy between Pivot and Persist, which is basically a Lean Startup way of asking Twist or Stick? That is, should you keep on with what you’re doing, or bring a new card in to change the dynamic? What’s missing from the whole picture surrounding this is that sometimes you really have to have faith in what you’re doing – to have faith that you’ve nailed the formula.

For me, CSI bringing in Ray Langston was an unsuccessful pivot simply because they dropped the magic human formula from the team when they did so. And now bringing in DB Russell is apparently turning the whole thing into music hall: not good, not good at all.

As far as pivoting goes, I really do think the kicker isn’t about technology but about the magic human formula at the heart of the business – for nearly all businesses are inherently social, are about people. Sure, if you haven’t yet touched on a magic formula, pivot all you like: but if you’ve found the thing that connects you to customers, don’t throw it away in a rush to pivot. Stay Grissom!

The ‘Inventor Script’ 2.0…

Next week [21st March 2012], I’ll be giving a talk at the Kingston Round Table of Inventors, a thoroughly lovely local inventor group that meets once a month or so at Kingston University, chaired by the well-respected Bob Lindsey. Feel free to come along, everyone’s welcome & there’s normally lively discussion in the Grove Tavern afterwards (a mere couple of hundred yards away), all highly recommended. 🙂

Here’s a link to my slides for the evening – feel free to check them out beforehand, that’s perfectly fine by me. 🙂

The Inventor Script – v001

Essentially, what I’ll be discussing, with copious examples from my own security camera company Nanodome, is something that really bothers me: the widely held notion that an Inventor’s quintessential path is to progress linearly from…

• [Invention] (i.e. devising a new way of doing something, or a way of doing something new), to…
• [Innovation] (i.e. turning it into something real, forming a business plan, getting funding, turning it into a business, etc), to…
• [Success]

This simplistic three-step programme is what I call the ‘Inventor Script‘. Yet if you look at the way things actually work out in practice (such as the James Dyson story), you find extraordinarily different paths being followed, and in a vast variety of ways. Moreover, all three ‘steps’ are much more subtle and nuanced than people generally think. What is invention? What is innovation? What is success?

But even if you accept this as a model, the key problem it has is that startup funding (in the UK) is now just plain broken. It’s not just that the banks have left the stadium, or that grants have been rarer than hens’ bicuspids, it’s that angels have become hopelessly unrealistic, with their 10x ‘home run’ exit dreams yanked from US Venture Capital jargon handbook. Even Dragons’ Den has had a substantially negative effect on the whole sector. (And don’t get me started on Venture Capitalists, bless ’em.)

So, with no serious access to ‘adventurous funding’ on offer (even with the SEIS), I think you can only sensibly conclude that the traditional Inventor Script is also broken. But what comes in its place? Basically, what does the ‘Inventor Script’ 2.0 look like?

I’ve got a fair few ideas about this which I’ll be discussing at the talk. The main one is that to bring inventions all the way to market, you need to be a bit like Superman, insofar as you need to bring a wide variety of business ‘superpowers’ to bear on the challenge to stand a reasonable chance. As a parallel, funding is (loosely speaking!) a lot like Kryptonite in that, as with Superman, it has the power to weaken, control, and destroy you if it gets too close.

So, funding is not only nearly impossible to get, but it can be very bad for your health even if you do get it. And the amount of effort you have to put in to raising funding would – in nearly every case – be much better spent on getting something to market. As a result, I truly believe that you should aim instead to apply your inventive mind to finding ways of building your product-exploitation company without any funding at all! Yes: zero, nil, none.

Anyway, feel free to have a look at my slides and leave comments here. They may well change a bit before the presentation, but the spirit will probably remain intact. 🙂

Looking back, I can see now that my startup funding timing was maximally bad. That is, I arrived on the startup ‘scene’ too late for the bear market party, too early for (what is slowly shaping up to be) the Lean Disco. But it is what it is, I am where I am. Hope to see you on Wednesday! 🙂