1. Find few friends you know that are involved in the tech industry, see if they're qualified, if not, ask them for leads to competent people.
2. Post on the web, that's less reliable, but you might find someone nearby.
CTO + lead, that's a hard role to find because you're looking at a more experienced person than someone relatively young. If you are determined, just network around your area and you might stumble upon your Sergey if your name happens to be Larry, you'll never know.
I don't really get the whole controversy with the angel industry. It's not a friendly world, it's vicious out there. You can't honestly just sit there, and expect the game to stay the same for the next century... It's a fast moving world. To stay competitive, new investment ideas should be developed, like Yuri's genius plan.
People are criticizing how it's a bad investment, but come on DST has earned god knows how much money from the three social network/deal/gaming giants, they can afford to lose some money. Bottom line, these offers are great for the entrepreneurs, which is what i believe pg would want, therefore he allowed Yuri/Conway to propose such deals to them. If these were horrible deals with massive strings attached, pg would never allow that to happen to his YC peeps.
The main reason i love what Yuri is doing is because this deal has increased the possibility of the American Dream. If you're brilliant enough and hard working enough, you don't need a rich family to become successful. Even if you lack in startup capital, YC, and soon many startup accelerator, as well as the increase flow of angel money (if angels want to stay competitive), will open endless doors of opportunities.
Well see, in my opinion being on the left of the -3 is somewhat a tradeoff. Of course there are plenty of within +- standard deviation folks who goes past the +3.
It's definitely not an overnight process, it's hard and difficult. Consists countless nights of unpraised hard work all just for a belief. There's no one there to give you a pat on the back. The journey gets really lonely.
As for the praised for effort, I definitely agree with that because usually people who work harder are those who achieve and improve faster because there is a learning curve and when a person learns a lot, he/she becomes a learning sponge and retain more info in less period of time. The best example I could think of is Michael Jordan.
do a random function of values between $1 dollar to $100 million, and whatever the output is, that's the value of your startup.
There is no formula. Everything is intrinsic. You might think your startup is worth $10m right now, but investors might think otherwise. If you really want to know, go find 10 finance majors and tell them how much they think your company is worth, average it, and that's probably the best way. The biggest factor you should account for is how much people are willing to pay for it, especially investor.
There's no secret. If you're a smooth talker, you might make a $100k idea valued at $1m. If you're a bad talker, you might make an $1m idea worth 100k. If you can convince Yuri Milner, you can probably make your 100k idea $10m. I guess you can factor that into account as well. ;-D
The answer is that you just have to trust your instincts. I believe you're at the beginning stage of entrepreneurial myopia, which is good because that's where innovation comes from, but at the same time you'd be amazed at how many great ideas people around the world come up with.
I'm not trying to discourage, instead I'm trying to encourage you. Like all initial ideas, unless you've been in the industry for years and years, yours probably haven't really taken shape yet, it's just a good start. I would highly recommend first sharing it with someone you trust, a close friend or mentor, to get some honest feedback about it.
And when you do look for a partner, you have to think about what you can offer. A web startup requires good developer/s. Unless you're willing to learn it all by yourself, or you're one of those rare people like my college roommate who hires six developers for his startup because he has the money to do that, prepare to give out chunks of your company out. The best solution I propose is to find two partners and give out 60%'ish. if you think you have a billion dollar idea, it's probably more viable to make it more than an idea than to worry about harvesting the money, because you'd be surprised at how many things could go wrong.
Bottom line is don't be paranoid. If you can convince a qualified developer to jump onboard for sweat equity, then maybe your idea does have potentials. Just don't share your idea with every other person, but don't become paranoid. At this stage, you should be worrying about finding a partner than about someone stealing your idea.
Sign a few sellers, and give really good offers for them to use your site. Then help those sellers advertise. Do it again. & Again
Keep building the snowball until it's big. It's not easy, but that's one possible one. It should much much easier nowadays with all the social networks, but nothing is easy. Just a lot of hard work and convincing.
Possibly. I mean in theory, correct me if I'm wrong since I haven't read any books on this type of stuff, VC investments always have a bubble like structure attached to it.
Every VCs nowadays want to find their Google or Facebook, so more and more LP's are investing into VC funds so all of them can get a piece of the social network / internet hype. If the VC firm's name is not Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins, or any well known firm name, it is probably not going to attract a lot of top tier entrepreneurs, but since they've already raised a fund, they got to invest somewhere.
In a way it's good for entrepreneurs, since there's a lot of available cash, but at the same time a lot of entrepreneurs are getting money for the "same ideas". So let's say 100 secret deals are made this month on new social networking sites. After a period of time, only one company will achieve high success, 4-5 are surviving and resilient, and the rests are gone. All this stuff is theory, but I'm sure if someone really digged into this, it can show that there's a lot of flaws with the VC industry.
But one thing keeps it going, which is winning. I mean once you start to win like Sequoia and KP, life is good. So I believe if there's competition, there's what people like to refer to as a bubble. Since not everyone can be a winner, there are always a lot of losers. I doubt there is going to be another dot com bubble burst, that just happened to be a crap load of bad investments faltering at once. In essence there's no that much theoretical difference between dot com bubble and the great depression.
It will just happen again and again because of Gordon Gekko's favorite phrase " Greed is Good"
$6.45 million on 43 ultra high potential startups, I wouldn't call it a bubble. If anything, I would wonder why others didn't start earlier. I consider this move by DST and YC an innovative pareto optimal solution for both entrepreneurs and investors.
First you have many startup ventures that have limited growth due to the lack of cash, the $150k is a really good booster to achieve relatively high performance for most of the startups in this tech industry. The fact that this is a no cap/discount deal is unheard, which why it is bringing so much publicity. This is a game changer for the industry.
It might be a risky investment, but the odds are not bad since the investment is diversified into 43 talented ventures instead of one. But furthermore I think this investment is more than just money. YC and DST are investing in the future of the tech industry.
Don't think of this as an investment for the current YC portfolio, rather, think of it as a marketing strategy for future YC applicants. With this sort of publicity with DST, as well as connections with other Valley's giant investors (cough Sequoia cough) , all of the great talents across America will start to apply for Y-Combinator. I have a feeling that YC's going to find its Facebook real soon. It's just a matter of time.
Well the central question is why did you raise the money? Your case seems to be atypical, but I think the best thing to do right now is to grow your business.
Instead of letting everything stay on a static basis of consistent 5k burn rate on a 9k monthly revenue, why not think of strategies to increase burn rate and increase revenue? If you took investor's money, I believe the key thing to do right now is to think how to increase your investor's stock value, which will also benefit you.
Don't even consider putting in a CD and Savings. If you do, it would be considered unethical if you're going to earn your investor the pathetic 3-4% in risk free asset, he's better off investing it from a mutual fund.
Hire. Spend. Grow. Never let cash sit idle, be a magician and transform money into more money.
Over-spending has been the doom of too many startups. Don't just grow for the sake of growing. Plan strategically and try to get your business profitable at least on an operating basis. More revenues does not mean more profits. Some things take money but there are other things that just require time. Sometimes, you just need to be around for so long for some things.
Keep the money in an FDIC-insured account, and don't worry about the interest. You need to focus on your business.
2. Post on the web, that's less reliable, but you might find someone nearby.
CTO + lead, that's a hard role to find because you're looking at a more experienced person than someone relatively young. If you are determined, just network around your area and you might stumble upon your Sergey if your name happens to be Larry, you'll never know.