Why is reading about raising money always such a time suck?
I swear, if we all spent as much time on our products, and less time reading about fundraising....well, we'd probably force AOL to shutter TechCrunch in a month.
This could well apply to recruitment of people: lines not dots.
Surely someone will invest in the 'dot' and he'll miss the chance. He seems to assume there is no competition. Or maybe what is a dot to him was already a line to someone else (because they met earlier).
I don't assume that at all. I'm arguing in favor of investors getting out and spending time with entrepreneurs now that they might want to fund later so that your line becomes someone else's dot.
For me, the real takeaway for entrepreneurs who want to get funded is to better "manage expectations." In other words, contact VC / angel early, set artificially low expectations initially (ones you know you can hit, so you build momentum), give yourself time, outperform, communicate out performance...rinse and repeat.
Can anyone give a better explanation of "performance" as shown by those graphs. What situation corresponds to performance going down? If performance relates to "speed", why would you expect the speed to continue increasing, rather than staying the same?
As I wrote in the article the interpretation is left to the investor. It could be product features shipped. It could be biz dev deals signed. It could be talented people hired. Whatever. The point is that you get to see how the person accomplishes things that they set out to do. If you meet them only briefly over a 2-week period you don't have enough data points to decide.
I thought this was going to be about investing in companies that connect entities together rather than standalone entities.
Huh. I thought it was an article about vector graphics vs bitmaps.