So I'll end with a funny graph on kind of the way I would think about going
after a VC investment is as we see the right funding model for your business.
I building a lifestyle business. Are you building something that is going after a $10 billion market or $8 billion market?
Maybe not. Maybe it's a passion business, something you just really want to build. I have a friend who runs a cookie business.
He does pretty well with Ben's cookies. Pretty good too.
It's not obviously that cool business. So think about other source of funding, crowdsourcing or Kickstarter or bootstrapping it.
So let's assume that you think the idea is big enough.
Have you gone out and raised the angel round first before you approached institutional investors?
Can you have some more friendlies around the table to help you out? And if you haven't come, mom and dad and then call your friends.
Was it friends? Fools and family is go the first the first stop and once you have and built out the business and
it has some metrics proving it is working then maybe consider going out and raising VC funding,
product market fit and unit economics. Two of the hardest things to prove.
But two of the things that I'll always ask you about can you tell?
Prove to me that what you're trying to build is what what consumers want usually at the early stage, no.
But have you done enough validation through focus groups, beta users, to actually prove that there's value to consumers?
And if you put more money into it, more consumers will want it. And I knew that economics is, I guess,
VC lingo for how much does it cost for you to acquire a user and how much money you're going to make for them over a lifetime?
Can you prove to me that your Google FCM campaign and your Facebook ad campaign is going to acquire use that this much
and you think you're going to make this much from them and that's something you can actually go out and test with.
Not that much money. You can run kind of mock campaigns and look at the data and figure out what the unit economics might be.
So I don't want you to have a full fledged five year business plan.
By the way, if anybody asks you that seed stage, it's pretty crazy.
I just want you to at least have validated it and through through some data channels and have no can you go through the channels to prove it?
And if your business is never going to have product market fit and you're effectively building something crazy, like for example,
there's a Kickstarter project right now for sending a UK mission to the moon and you can actually buy a piece of the UK's first ever moon mission.
Definitely not VC fundable and but if you actually building something that's
a consumer electronic product or something that might be a fashion product,
is Lending Club or Kickstarter or some other crowdfunding channel more appropriate than going through through the process with a venture capitalist?
And if all these answers lead to yes,
then think about the pitch and how you tell a story and the metrics that you have and how you get good advice from other entrepreneurs and
how you do research and who you're going to go target the right partner at the right firm who might have done something in a similar space.
Or think about maybe an incubator or an accelerator as a way to actually kind of define that story and then hit the road.
It's not for the faint hearted, just in the sense of 99 times out of 100 I'll say no.
But I will say this there's a changing ecosystem, especially in Europe,
of more people like me that come from a more entrepreneurial and operational background becoming investors.
So the questions that I ask you will be more around product and your roadmap and your technical
team than there will be about this kind of cash flows and your five year projections.
That matters to me. But if actually I'm betting I'm taking a pretty bold bet at a very early stage,
the idea is I'm here to back the ambition and let's work together in actually proving out that we can get there.
So hopefully that gives you some insight into how we or at least I think about VC investment,
some of the pitfalls for entrepreneurs and some of the other ways in which you can think about funding funding your own Start-Up idea.
So thanks so much.