Another Credit Card VC adopter
I know I’m linking to Guy twice in a row, but his latest post makes it clear that he fully groks the Credit Card VC ethos:
Because of Truemors, Ive learned a lot about launching a company in these Web 2.0 times. Heres quick overview by the numbers.
- 0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).
- 0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.
Now, Guy will tell you that this is not the next Microsoft or Google, it’s a service that may grow on its own and maybe someday some bigger organization will want to add it to a portfolio because of the user base or whatever, and so it may have a nice exit someday.
But the best part, I think, for Guy is that when people send him business plans about how they really need to have $1 million Angel Round so that the team can develop a prototype, he can look them right in the eye and say, “Why? I launched a site for $12,107.09, and within two weeks it had 315,000 hits in Google. Why do you need 82.596 TIMES the money I spent to do what you want to do?”
They better have a darn good answer to that question.
In my second go around as a Credit Card-Self-Venture-Capitalist.
another case of Mr. Kawasaki and the GIF (good idea fairy) syndrome.
To offer up a wholesale “I did it (under a perfect situation with the implied ability for me to entirely control the circumstances), why can’t you”, is indicative of the atypical ivy tower behavior. If Mr. Kawasaki is so all knowing, perhaps we should airdrop him into Anbar and let him solve the Mid East crisis for $12,107.09. That would be a matter to brag about.
On the flip side, I agree, asking for outrageous sums of money indicates someone who hasn’t planned well. Again, creditcard vc and/or sbir is the way to go. Leaving yourself in the hands of the VC is like leaving your chickens with foxes and not expecting them to be eaten.
$12,107.09? Are you kidding me? Most people these days can do it for under $1000.