When the acquisition window closed, these companies ended up on the business end of a an e-mail with a tombstone on it. At that point, they need to ratchet up their sales, marketing and PR efforts post haste. Because when it is time for the next round of funding, the VCs will have changed their tune and will be insisting on a sales track record and a viable busines model. http://blog.pr-vantage.com/?p=513

http://www.adeoressi.com/2008/11/15/the-vc-mode...

But the entrepreneur community is fighting back and getting organized: thefunded.com of course, but also people like Dave McClure and startup2startup.com. The best way I have seen for entrepreneurs is to help each other. Start your own group of people you trust, and grow it. Better yet: join another group, and then bring the people you trust. As with any group, the quality is a function of the members. But it’s so much easier to be accepted in an entrepreneur group than to break into an investor group. Fellow entrepreneurs share the same pains and understand each other.

Bottom line: as an entrepreneur, go out today and meet other entrepreneurs. That’s the best thing you can do (the rest of the time, work on your product).

This article is an infruriating piece of journalism. It’s similar to a Palin interview: all jingoism, surface level analysis and bereft of any real data or understanding. It’s also an example of what’s wrong with tech blogging these days: needless piling on without any value add. How does this article actually contribute to the discussion? I’m sick of seeing all these bloggers scour Techmeme for the most popular topic of the day and then re-blog it without adding any new context or value. Enough, already. Talk about an industry segment that is broken.

Is amazing how hard is to get some attention from VCs if you aren’t a “player” in the entrepreneur enviroment (ie: if you’re just some guy in his 20s). Most of the time, is not about your idea at all, but who send you there and who you “know” or what “friends” you have. At the end the real innovators are left aside, with only a few getting funding, while lots of ‘wantrepreneurs’ get most of the cash for what amounts to just a bunch of me-too ideas that go nowhere.

Anyway, I wouldn’t tout FB, twitter and youtube as success stories, seeing that the first two are still on the red (technically, since spending surpasses incomes) and youtube got away with it thanks to google, but it’s still unprofitable.

Therefor the big jump in Endowments putting VC assets on the market reported by Bloomberg and referenced in the article may not be signaling the overall demise of this investment class, as it is just a structural realignment due to larger market aftershocks. It would be more telling to know what the Angels, Hedge Funds and Private Equity types are doing with their VC assets, as they typically do not operate under these constraints.

Classically, VCs would invest in companies before they launched; you needed millions of dollars to build your product, and then you’d raise more money to market it.

Today, it’s really a game of “dump and chase” (to borrow a hockey term). Companies launch and get traction before raising money. This is true of several of the investments I’ve been involved with, like PBwiki (first VC investment 18 months after launch) and Ustream (first VC investment 12 months after launch).