Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Covering the high tech industry and startups on a day to day basis, I often run into entrepreneurs looking to attract the attention of venture capitalists with what they think is the “next great idea”. Usually, if it’s not the proverbial “napkin”, it’s maybe a few PowerPoint slides or a business plan.

After interviewing lots and lots of entrepreneurs who have managed to secure funding for their companies — or not — it’s become clear to me that except in some very specific exceptions, businesses — not ideas — are what are funded. There are lots and lots of people with ideas out there — but very few who can truly execute and build a business.

So if you’re an entrepeneur, my advice is:

1) Stop talking about what a great idea you have, and start making it happen.

2) Drop the excuses. ie “If only I could get funding, then I could make this happen” - there’s lots of ways to start making progress on your idea, even without capital.

3) Bootstrap it, if you have to. Steve Mednick recently added an article to our Startup Section which talks about Bootstrapping Your Business, which is well worth reading.

4) Start building the business first, then start looking for funding. Companies that have built product are a far more likely to get funding than those who haven’t; companies who have real, paying customers even more so.

There are lots of people with some really great ideas, but if you can’t turn your ideas into something — without having to get some funding first — you’re unlikely to get funding in the first place.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 11:52 am and is filed under Startups, Venture Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.