langer

I think it depends on how confident you are that the 'other investors' you mention want to invest.

If they want in, you could be seeding an ego battle which your startup can leverage to get better terms.

If they don't and start dissing your startup then you could be shooting yourself in the foot.

Great to see such a diverse mix of people - I met fellow Brits, people from across the US and even someone who traveled over from New Zealand.

The line up was top-notch, and between Greg McAdoo's and Sam Altman's fundraising demystification, DHH's evangelism of charging users, PG's preaching about being good, and the opinionated snoring dude with the hat, it was both an inspirational and entertaining day.

sorry if this comes as a shock, but you're british for life :)

sounds spot on to me :)

so, next question.. almost warrants another thread, but i'll ask you it here for now: who are the best product guys in the UK/Europe? are they on the list of official "product expert" mentors? http://seedcamp.com/pages/mentors

i agree with your point that it's v. important for the team to have the necessary transferable business skills early on. a group of introvert hackers who lack them could easily fail, even if they've built a relatively good product.

nevertheless, my impression of YC is that even with an 80%+ focus on product, there's still time to pick up some good business knowledge reading blogs and speaking to the YC alumni who most certainly have strong business skills amongst them.

in addition to this, surely the job of the seed investors (which can usually be attracted by a YC company who build a good product) is to give more of a commercial focus, and help the founders hire the right 'biz/marketing guys' later on?

however, my experience of most of the 'hacker' founders on YC is that they've got more business skills than almost all of the young entrepreneurs i know in the UK!

@madmotive: I’ve got a lot of respect for the main goal of Seedcamp, namely to inspire the next generation of Europe’s serial entrepreneurs. However, I think apexauk’s points above hit the nail on the head — more focus on openly, iteratively and rapidly building a product than worrying too much about perfecting the business model.

I too hope Seedcamp embraces these principles — and if they do, they’ve got a very good chance of achieving their goal.

yep, totally agree - i coulda mentioned them (and benchmark/balderton) along with index. accel seem to be much more confident than the london-only vcs.

Sounds like a good night ian. Unfortunately we can't make the 30th but could definitely do the 27th.

Hi, dood. We're a small team based in Oxford, UK. Would be cool if you can make it to the event kul mentioned - parts of the event (including drinks with everyone afterwards ;-) ) are open to anyone. E-mail jonathan[dot]black[at]sbs[dot]ox[dot]ac[dot]uk for more info. Otherwise we can meet up in London some time. In fact, are you at Minibar this week?

I recently started blogging about UK start-ups at http://davidlanger.co.uk so am also keen to hear about more hackers, entrepreneurs etc. working on stuff this side of the pond.