I love this: a group of venture capitalists have set up a Twitter channel, VCTips, to give advice to startups who are trying to raise seed money.
Among the words of wisdom articulated in 140 characters or less (the limit of a Twitter post is 140 characters):
- Having your PC bog down in the middle of a presentation is a bummer. Come into the meeting on a clean boot. (@robhayes)
- It's perfectly ok to make mistakes in running your start up, just don't make the same ones twice (@aweissman)
- this is for everyone. not just entrepreneurs. don't ask for advice if you really don't want to hear it (@bijan)
- no powerpoint slide should ever have 26 bullet points on it. (@bfeld)
- when I ask for your revenue model four times and receive four different sets of hand waving I am going to get suspicious. (@robhayes)
- trying to be "X done right" when X = an unproven service is not a compelling way to frame your business. (@bryce)t
- he trend is your friend; demonstrate how a market is or will be growing in alignment with your business. timing is everything. (@aweissman)
- if you haven't bothered to run your presentation through a spell checker I am likely to make the assumption that you are not detail oriented (@robhayes)
- words to eliminate from your vcpitch - "space" (@bfeld)
- another word to abolish from your vocabulary: "traction". That's what you are in when you have a serious accident. (@bfeld)
- If the VC has a blog, read it. It should give you some good insight into how they think... (@joshk)
