Founders Lessons Learned - Part 4: Venture Capitalists

1. If you are presenting the business plan to VC you don’t know and you can’t trust he won’t get the idea and build it somewhere else; it is better to present a plan for something related to the idea not the whole picture to judge what is the reaction of VC and get to know him.
2. Don’t get frustrated from VC when you present ideas, and they mention low experience, this is considered an advantage more than a disadvantage. For start-ups, VC looks into team spirit & idea more than experience.
3. Expect the following questions from VC:
1. What is your background?
2. Too young, how many years of experience?
3. Do you have management experience?
4. How are you going to make money if you are going to give it away for free?
5. What's the revenue mechanism?
4. VCs always have deals and back-doors technical people don’t like, sometimes you might want not to share all ideas with your VC.

Founders Lessons Learned - Part 3: Business plan

1. A business plan is nothing more than your own communication to a person not sitting in front of you—an imaginary person who will read it. Try to answer every possible question that that person could raise.
2. Writing a business plan is a MUST, it will crystallize your thoughts to communicate your ideas with somebody else.
3. Business plan is all about showing your momentum.
4. Having a business plan for big scope, having complete vision distributed on several phases shows your strong vision for the idea and its growth.
5. Business plan should tell:
1. What the company is going to do?
2. What problem it is going to solve?
3. How big the market is?
4. What the sources of revenue for the company are?
5. What your exit strategy is for your investors?
6. What amount of money is required?
7. How you are going to market it?
8. What kind of people you need?
9. What the technology risks, marketing risks, execution risks?
6. Funding in business plan, it is always better to prepare the figures before you present your idea, and you should be having multiple numbers in mind, i.e.:

1. Required x, for completing the whole idea.
2. Required y, for handling … number of customers.
3. Required z, for making a POC to show your idea can actually work to VC.
4. Required w, for covering specific region.

Founders Lessons Learned - Intro

Learning from others is the best in order not to re-invent the wheel and fall in the same mistakes others already did. For founders, it is a MUST as lots can't afford bad start.

I have collected some lessons learned from my readings, & experience. I summarized them in bullet points in the following blog posts:

1. Part 1: Idea
2. Part 2: Team
3. Part 3: Business Plan
4. Part 4: Venture Capitalists
5. Part 5: Architecture
6. Part 6: Project / Product development
7. Part 7: Operations
8. Part 8: Marketing

The following are the references for such tips:

1. Book: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. ISBN-10: 1590597141 | ISBN-13: 978-1590597149
2. Magazine article: Arrajol Magazine interview with Greg Booth, Zippo President and CEO.

I will keep this post and related posts updated whenever I read more books or learn new experience hopping this will help some founders / start-ups. Also, I'm open for input from readers as comments and I will update the posts as well.