A Brief Encounter with the VC kind

Life takes a course of its own. You never know where it leads you to. While aimlessly walking down the path called life, I happened to stumble upon the "VC" community. My brief encounter with VCs left me astounded at the simplicity with which they decided where to invest. "Spray and you pray" is how they call it. Here are some bits and pieces of advise that I recollect.


"Do not come to me with a PPT. I believe Microsoft has created PPT's to reduce people's IQ"

"Business Plans and Sausages are alike! If you know how they are made, then you would not eat it"

"Come to me and convince me that you know what you are doing and I shall give you the money"

"Spray and I pray. If any one of the 20 investments I make works out, then I am happy"


Something that I learnt that day was that VC's are interested in our ideas ( and so is Google). All that they want us to do is to demonstrate our belief in our ideas. If we can convince them that we have thought the entire process through, that we have done the ground work and that we have the right team to take things forward- that's half the battle won. They know that luck favours the brave.

Some other sound advice which I garnered from the VC community are:

Get a prototype ready - you can get seed funding to start prototyping; but then you lose heavily on equity. Finish your prototype , get some traction and then approach investors. Thats the best and easiest way to get first round of funding.

Most successful ventures start with ideas. The next step is to take these "ideas to market" [Ian Angell, Ashutosh Khanna 2008 :D]. Only then do you understand if there is any "dumm" (hindi for something that transaltes to traction, belief etc) in your idea. First and foremost this requires you to have complete faith in your project and your abilities. This has to be supported with the right team. As Guy Kawasaki puts it -

"Find soulmates"!!! "Every young visionary needs adult supervision," he jokes. Behind every Bill Gates is a Steve Ballmer. Behind Steve Jobs is a Steve Wozniak. Build a management team that shares your vision and your enthusiasm, but complements your weaknesses with their strengths.

If you are interested in starting something of your own I would recommend Fred Destin's blog and Guy Kawasaki's blog as a must read ! and just before you decide to present your business plan it would be ideal to have a look at Guy's video on "Art of the start"

This further conditions my belief that the world runs on 2 things - as Ash puts it trust and sentiment.

And in this idealistic world, I too have dared to dream - to start something of my own. And with me is Prashant (with wholehearted encouragement and blessings from Ian and Ash). We are a great team and we are gonna kick ass !