Entrepreneur: Investors
by Miki Saxon
Investor to entrepreneur: I won’t fund you because
- You are over 25
- You are under 30
- You are a woman with children or who might get pregnant
- You haven’t done it before
- I don’t know you
- I don’t know the person who introduced us
- Your startup isn’t a [flavor du jour] (e.g., internet or mobile business in 2011]
Do these sound ridiculous to you? They shouldn’t, all of them have happened and several to people I know personally.
It’s hard when you are looking for funding to remember that the people who seem to hold your future in their hands don’t have a pipeline to the future or supernatural powers that that lets them identify which idea is gold and which isn’t; who will succeed and who won’t.
But they don’t.
What they do have is their judgment, based on past experience and colored by their personal opinions, prejudices and peculiarities.
In other words, investors, whether VCs, angels or corporate, are just people with access to lots of money as opposed to having super-natural powers—although you may have trouble convincing some of them or that.
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/techcrunch/5037968080/
