Archive for the ‘Venture capital’ Category
Ready for a GeekShop?
September 12th, 2007
There were a few posts recently regarding incubators. This made me think a little but and I think there is a market for a “shared start-up business center”. If you read Guy Kawasaki’s blog recently then you probably know about TechShop, a place where people can subscribe (pretty much like a gym) and use heavy machinery and tools.
Traditional business centers already exist, but they are mostly equipped with basic amenities such as conference rooms, copiers, faxes and so on. Basic stuff and nothing very impressive. A geek-ish business center could have much more such as a shared small scale data center where you could “borrow” space on an existing server until your project is ready for prime time. Having a limited number of businesses could result in decent performances compared to an overcrowded shared hosting provider.
Having multiple of those geek-ish business centers would also allow redundancy and geographical load balance thus allowing users to benefit from a heavy duty data center at a very low cost. Try getting this from your current hosting company…
On the HR side, there could be many beneficial services such as accountants, lawyers, marketing gurus, programmers, designers and other freelance people. These resources could be available on a contract basis or be included as part of the regular package. Of course, VC folks would be very interested in following those new start-ups and I believe that high quality start-ups would come out of this machine.
Basically incubator meets business centers. This could allow people with ideas to come in, “add some water” and voila!
There are some incubators and similar services around here but none of them offer the equivalent of what TechShop offers.
Posted in Incubator, Montreal, Startups, Venture capital, business | Comments (0)
Micro financing in Montreal..?
September 10th, 2007
MontrealTechWatch has a great post regarding Angel financing in Montreal. I spoke to a VC analyst some time ago and it’s true that VC’s want to invest as much money as possible in as little projects as possible. It only makes sense to them. If you have $100M then you’d want to minimize the workload by investing 1M$ in 100 projects. It’s sad to say but you don’t want to invest $100K in 1000 projects. That wouldn’t be efficient at all and I must confess that I agree with them on that point. Investing in too many projects require more resources to monitor those projects and it lowers any potential gains they can make over time.
I guess this is something WE do all the time in a way. In order words, why bother putting a little bit of money in many bank accounts when we can put all our money in a few accounts that have different risk levels as long as our overall risk level is acceptable..? I don’t think anyone would feel very excited about having to deal with a dozen of so bank accounts. That would be way too much work. In that way, same goes with VC’s.
With that in mind, I also agree with Heri on the fact that some people don’t need a lot of money. I, for instance, am working on a project where I don’t need a full scale datacenter to support my project. Of course, if you give me $2M then I might re-think my wish-list but I don’t need that much money, at least not for the first year or so. But on the other side, I could use a few $10K’s to pay for a full time programmer, an artist, etc.
So what to do? Garage’s idea about a seed fund is nice. Put some money in a high risk, high reward fund. Let a college graduate (tech-savvy and low paid) manage it. A one or two million dollar fund could go quite far especially if there is a $100K investment limit. I don’t know about you but I could do a LOT of things with that much money and I’m not talking about buying Aeron chairs.
Other than “micro-financing”, I believe that an incubator would be welcomed as long as they don’t get too much participation in return of a small investment. Y Combinator, for example, received bad critics for getting a too big participation while bringing-in little value. While I don’t want to bring the eternal issue of participation and % of shares, it’s often better to have a little piece of something big than a big piece of nothing. Small companies often have the same needs as larger ones do. No one is an Internet marketing, accounting, HR guru and getting some help/coaching through an incubator is a nice thing.
Posted in Incubator, Startups, Venture capital, business, investissement | Comments (1)
