Insights
- Avoid mistakes. Here are ten common reasons that investors say no.
- Build a financeable business even if you don't raise capital. Check investor blogs and tweets to learn how they view the world. You can learn a lot from Fred Wilson, Ben Horowitz, Josh Kopleman, and Venture Hacks by Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikant. There are dozens of others, including Bill Gurley and Brad Feld. There is a big, incomplete list here. OATC's Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) is the VC Twitter king. Big list of investors who use Twitter here.
- Incubators are a useful place to test ideas, meet entrepreneurs, and raise seed financing, especially for lean social or mobile startups. The best known is YCombinator. Others include TechStars, the vulgar but smart 500Startups, eHatchery, AngelPad, and Capital Factory. Robert Shedd has put together a list of incubators from around the world and in smaller US cities here.
- The Funded lets people rate investors. Half of the ratings are dead on and half are utter bullshit from people who belong on a site called The Unfunded. Up to you to figure out which is which.
