Entrepreneurial

– Chris Dixon is the co-founder of Hunch and of seed fund Founder Collective. This blog originally appeared here. The views expressed are his own. –

I recently taught a class via Skillshare (disclosure: Founder Collective is an investor) about how to raise a seed round. After a long day I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but it turned out to be a lot of fun and I stayed well past the scheduled end time. I think it worked well because the audience was full of people actually starting companies, and they came well prepared (they were all avid readers of tech blogs and had seemed to have done a lot of research).

I sketched some notes for the class which I’m posting below. I’ve written ad nauseum on this blog (see contents page) about venture financing so hadn’t planned to blog more on the topic. But since I wrote up these notes already, here they are.

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1. Best thing is to either never need to raise money or to raise money after you have a product, users, or customers. Also helps a lot if you’ve started a successful business before or came from a senior position at a successful company.

2. Assuming that’s not the case, it’s very difficult to raise money, even when people (e.g. press) are saying it’s easy and “everyone is getting funded.”

– This is a Venture Capital Journal article that  appeared on PE Hub – both are Thomson Reuters publications. –

There’s no denying that an incubator rebirth is taking place, thanks in large measure to Y Combinator.

Y Combinator clones are everywhere. Several dozen of them already exist and insiders expect more than 100 such incubators will be operating nationwide before long. And they’re busy churning out plenty of startups. This past week, AngelPad held a demo day for its startups to pitch VCs, its second demo day in less than six months.

peHub‘s Dan Primack spoke with Reuters about a new kind of startup that’s designed to develop an idea and then be snapped up by a larger company.

As Primack explains, these startups differ from the traditional sort in that they tend to be interested in creating targeted web services or applications rather than conventional companies with longer-term growth ambitions.

“The hope for these companies isn’t to create the next Google or the next Cisco, the goal is to create a little application that Google or Cisco or Facebook or Twitter wants and then will purchase,” he explains.