The Startup Journey

Indie.vc is a new experiment (in the US) that provides equity like capital to founders in return for cash distributions from profits instead of needing to sell out or taking their company public. The philosophy: There’s a mythology that entrepreneurs need to take VC money to hit the big time. While it’s true that some companies really do need outside capital, there are many examples of great companies that have reached revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars, or even gone public, without ever taking in capital, or taking it in only at a late stage, when they’d already created a high valuation by bootstrapping the company. ...Like cement, the cultural foundation for new projects and companies sets early. Those who focus on raising outside capital and achieving fundable milestones have a very difficult time getting off that VC treadmill. Those who focus on creating value for customers and generating positive cash flow from the very beginning are able to make their own decisio...

Useful PPT (by Tim Dick of US-based Startup Capital Ventures) for entrepreneurs in fund raising mode. If it makes your head swim, you know you need to hire a good lawyer (ideally one does not do work for investors as well). Hat tip: Sidd Das Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs Reach Out to Investors, Research Competition, Learn from Experienced Entrepreneurs and Interact with Peers. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

From a post by AnnMaria of The Julia Group. ..sometimes, as Paul Hawken has said, the biggest problem with small businesses is that they have too much money. That may sound crazy, but I have always tried to keep overhead to the bare minimum. Almost everyone who works for us is a contractor, which means we pay them when we have work and when we don’t have work for them to do, we don’t pay them. I’m not too worried about being first to market – I see how well that worked out for VisiCalc and Netscape. I’ve way too much experience to think that you can do a project twice as fast with six programmers as with three. After 27 years, I still have an office in my house. When I meet people, I usually go to lunch... Interesting and certainly worth thinking about... Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products...

Economic Times has an article on some of the lesser known funding options available for start-up ventures. Govt grants and loans The Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) has also formed the SIDBI Foundation for Risk Capital to develop and provide appropriate risk capital products for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in different industry segments. Some of the products introduced are equity and equity-like instruments and mezzanine instruments like optionallyconvertible debt and subordinate debt for MSMEs. With a corpus size of 2,000 crore, the fund will invest a minimum of 25 lakh and a maximum of 10 crore in the form of term loans or assistance. “Our products are easy to work around with. Risk capital has both the characteristic of equity and debt. It’s a very flexible product,” says SIDBI general manager R Dharmaji. ... Credit Guarantee Scheme It is to bypass the issue of collateral that the government has come up with the Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for...