Why Do I Keep Getting NO From Investors?

If you want funding, you need to start with a business that is fundable.  Ask any serious advisor or investor and you will get an absolute truth: 99% of the ideas as they come are NOT fundable.

From here you have only three choices. One is not so smart. The other two are just fine.

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When Should You Move To Silicon Valley?

The question continues to come up often in our work with global entrepreneurs, so further to my earlier Harvard Business Review piece, I will add more color to it. First, here’s a recap from the HBR piece:

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Looking Forward to the Real Silicon Valley

I am one of those people who doesn’t like bubbles. Right now, we’re experiencing a bubble in Silicon Valley with funny money driving weird, unproductive behavior.

Some people want this party to go on.

I don’t.

Francisco Dao has written a poorly analyzed post on VentureBeat titled What will happen to Silicon Valley when demographics strangle the global economy:

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Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Are you selling direct? Are you selling through the channel? How are you going to market?

Manmeet Singh: Since 2013, we have had a direct sale strategy. We have Compuware as a reseller. Our product is available to be downloaded from Hortonworks on Hadoop, which recently went public. People can download and play with the product, but obviously, it will be a direct strategy because Hortonworks doesn’t want to resell our product right now.

Sramana Mitra: So far, you’ve mostly sold direct? >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2012, you had around $1.5 million in revenue and you had a bunch of customers. In 2013, Samsung expressed interest in both becoming a customer and an investor. That’s when you started seeing the traction from the VCs?

Manmeet Singh: Yes. Toba Capital moved faster than anybody else. My old angels have always kept the company alive. We still had a note of about $3 million to $4 million. >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 5)

Manmeet Singh: Those four years were a struggle for me. Generally, entrepreneurs don’t last four or five years of struggle. There was no money and very little revenue. The VCs weren’t spending money and enterprise business was not looked upon as a good business. That’s the reason why I was out every week raising money.

Sramana Mitra: It’s amazing. The story that you told of being out raising money – $5 million worth of convertible note. I’ve never heard that before.

Manmeet Singh: I know nobody has done that before because I thought this was the norm when I was doing it. I didn’t get guidance. Now I do. At that point, I did not have that much exposure. >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 4)

Manmeet Singh: I stayed on my course. VCs were not ready to put in money. If you look at history, that was the worst time to raise money. That was the time that I had to go from one angel to another. I did coffee and lunch where I invited 10 to 20 people. Five of them showed up. Everybody wrote a check worth $35,000 to $50,000. Basically, this is how I got my first $7 million.

Sramana Mitra: How were you pricing the round? I imagine the $7 million was not in convertible debt.

Manmeet Singh: You’d be surprised. $5 million was in convertible debt.

Sramana Mitra: Wow! I’ve never heard this before. >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This is from VCs or angels?

Manmeet Singh: It was angels but most of these angels were working as partners in large VC corporations. They go personally to these conferences. They came by my booth, saw my idea, and asked me, “How many people?” I told them three. They were interested and asked me if I was looking to raise money. They asked me to come in to demonstrate the idea and product. I did that with one more guy. They agreed to fund it. They had checked my past experience. They liked that I was working at a large enterprise and I had done two more startups.

Sramana Mitra; All this is happening in 2008 or 2009?

Manmeet Singh: That was Oracle OpenWorld 2008. >>>