September 2, 2011 – T-machine.org

Inside story on raising $24m funding, and working with VC’s

I believe this is the best post I’ve seen on startup funding since the creation of Venture Hacks:

Raising money for a startup is an inherently risky proposition. You step up to the plate knowing that the odds are slim and that, for every story of success on TechCrunch, there’s two hundred companies pounding the street, getting nowhere. We went the opposite route – letting investors come to us.
…
This is the story of that experience – being “pitched” by investors, the decision-making and negotiation processes and the end results.

Rand writes in detail the complete story of a major funding round for his startup, where other CEO’s are “too busy” or don’t have the balls to share publicly.

He talks about what happens when you “practice” things that leading-lights of the VC and Entrepreneur world have long been “preaching”.

He lays out a strategy popular with armchair entrepreneurs, and relates his experience of how it can go wrong.

This should be required reading for any serious Tech Entrepreneur / Startup team…

A delightful quote from Google.

Although equally, Florian Mueller has an interesting analysis on whetherGoogle really wants to kill patents – or just kill “patents which Google doesn’t already own”?

note that Google’s discussion of its intellectual property rights starts with patents. They could have started with copyright, trademarks and trade secrets, putting patents last. No, they put them first.

So are they against patents? It seems they like their own patents very much (including the absurd Google Doodle patent, which they spent ten years fighting for) and are only against other people’s and companies’ patents.

Based on their activity over the past 5 years, I’d say Florian’s view seems closer to the truth: as a corporation, they seem to be well aware of such things as patent law, but uninterested in doing anything about it until it suits them. That’s fine, but it makes people less interested in working with them when they later cry “foul!” … Google seems much like a fairweather friend, in reverse.