The Truth About Startup Fundability

There is too much money chasing too few venture scale deals. As a result, sometimes, VCs fund deals that should not be funded to appease their Limited Partners. And then, they drive these ventures to failure. Let me explain. Let us say, you have been successful in raising $5M in venture capital.

Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying is that the lifetime value of the customers is very high. People sign up for an extended period of time to develop themselves and their resumes.

Start With Customers Not Investors

For our Seed Capital series of podcasts, I’ve interviewed hundreds of investors, especially micro-VCs and angels who play an important role in the early-stage game. The toughest round of funding an entrepreneur will seek to raise is Pre-seed. How do you increase your odds? Pre-seed has the lowest probability of success. Over 99% of the

Read Full Article »

The Accelerator Conundrum: Fundraising Playbook for Bootstrapping Founders

The Accelerator Conundrum is a multipart series that challenges the prevailing wisdom of the tech startup ecosystem that entrepreneurs should Blitzscale out of the gate. Written by Sramana Mitra, the Founder and CEO of One Million by One Million (1Mby1M), the world’s first global virtual accelerator, it emphatically argues that a better strategy is to Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, focus

Read Full Article »

What Makes Your Startup Hard to Copy

AI is making it easy to build ultralight startups. AI is also making it easy for copycats to flood the market with competing products. Investors HATE a market full of copycats. If you are looking to raise funding, you have to be able to establish a defensibility thesis. By and large, if you are building

Read Full Article »

Why VCs Keep Saying No

Are you trying to raise money for your startup and getting rejections? It’s worth understanding WHY. VCs are looking for Velocity. Their goal is to achieve $100M in revenue in 5-7 years. How do you do that?

Deal Radar 2009: Convio

Convio provides online constituent relationship management (eCRM) solutions for nonprofit organizations. Founder Vinay Bhagat noticed the lack of automation and [high] member attrition rates while volunteering at a public television station pledge drive, and saw that the traditional nonprofit engagement channels of direct mail, telemarketing and individual solicitation suffered from limitations that often conflicted with

Read Full Article »