It is a whole new world in Silicon Valley. The place where venture equity seemed to grow on trees has discovered, of all things, bootstrapping. Serving up barbecue to friends to get them to write code and working out of incubators that operate at night so folks can keep their day jobs are just a few of the bootstrapping start-up techniques being seen in Silicon Valley these days.
John Wark sent along a story from siliconvalley.com that describes how
the same crowd that a few years ago seemed to get VC funding for just
showing up at a meeting, is now having to scrape by like the rest of us.
Interesting times, indeed…..
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By the way, speaking of bootstrapping, I’ll be speaking to the Nashville group of entrepreneurs called Better Bootstrap tonight.
Very interesting times. The recession has been a wake up call to investments in Silicon Valley ventures. Also, investors have gotten smarter about investing in internet ventures. At one time it was possible to launch a venture, pump it up in popularity, and then sell based on popularity and not on an efficient revenue model. It became realized that for many of these ventures, once they were sold they often died off and the investment was lost. Silicon Valley is adapting to the realization that popularity does not always equal revenue and investors have become much more cautious about where to invest their money. Fortunately, the talent pool in Silicon Valley is still enormous and great things still happen there that have the potential to shape the world we live in tomorrow. And those are the things the new investors are looking for.