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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

"I have a degree in economics, an MBA from Berkeley, and over 30 years of business experience. Do you know what question I hear in Silicon Valley nearly every time I meet with potential investors for CalendarTree?"

I would have supposed that Scott Adams has become quite wealthy from the Dilbert strip, his many books and all the spin-off merchandise (calendars, toys, etc.). Why would he need to look for outside investors to fund his app rather than just investing his own money? And if he's not willing to risk his own money to start his new business, what message does that send to potential investors?

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Investors understand risk management. It is possible he knows he needs 15MM to go for the home run, but doesn't want put in the 15MM himself and go bankrupt in the process. Investors allow him to shoot for the moon.

Also, investors help with accountability, pushing through tough spots, connections, advice, etc. Investors also add credibility that 'rich white guy throws money at project' doesn't give.

Seems like you could write a shared calendar app for way less than $15M. And it's already in beta, so a lot of the development has been done already.

I also wonder how much success he's going to get selling to enterprise customers. Any company with over 200 employees already has a calendar system (Outlook or some cloud equivalent).

Pretty sure the $15 million referred to a long-term bet, that takes years to get through the burning cash phase and into profitability.

If you hire 20 people for the first year, that's going to cost three million dollars (if you're lucky) for everything all-in, without calculating potentially high customer acquisition costs early on.

Writing the calendar app is the least expensive, least difficult and least time consuming part of building a large scale business around it.

If you wanted to go big, and had three years to do it, you could easily burn through $10 or $15 million trying to get there before generating your first quarterly profit.

>Investors understand risk management.

Heh. That's putting it mildly. Yes, he's hedging his bets. He has some Dilbert money he doesn't want to lose in case CalendarTree tanks. This is antithetical to a typical image of an entrepreneur who goes all in, and is a fanatical believer in the success of his or her product. A cynical angel may look at his start-up from that perspective.

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