“The [venture capital] industry has become conflated with entrepreneurship in the popular imagination as well as in policy circles, with the result being a widespread and incorrect belief that venture capital is a necessary and sufficient condition in driving growth entrepreneurship.”, Right-sizing Venture Capital by the Kauffman Foundation.
Jeff Putz
on 31 Jul 12What I find most strange about the tech association between VC and being an entrepreneur is that most of the stuff we’re building requires so little in the way of physical materials to make. I mean, we’re making stuff on the Internets, which doesn’t require machine shops, or massive manufacturing operations. It doesn’t even really require offices, if you don’t mind working in a distributed and remote environment. The only significant expense is people.
Jim Maher
on 31 Jul 12The common perception that venture capital is a requirement for entrepreneurship has, I believe, the effect of INIHIBITING entrepreneurship! The misinformed say to themselves “I’ll never get funding for this crazy idea!”
It’s exactly those CRAZY ideas that we need!!!
It ain’t easy, but hard work usually accomplishes far more than ready access to too much cash.
Keep it simple. Start small. Build something – anything – that sorta-kinda works. Ideas are a dime a dozen; it’s the physical deliverable that matters. If you build it, they will come.
What are you doing now, sleeping nights?
Jack Tripper
on 31 Jul 12Nice refreshing video. I’m almost in my 4th year of running a small web-based software company. Quarter of a million in yearly revenue – no offices, everything is remote and we are profitable. In the beginning there was sort of an industry pressure to get funding. Every time the subject came up internally, we would ask ourselves if we really needed it and every time the answer was “not really.” Customers from all over the world love and depend on our services. We’re doing really good things to help our industry – we’re making an impact. And yet, we’ll never make it onto Tech Crunch (for example) just because a VC didn’t throw $5 million into our bank account.
Mohamed
on 01 Aug 12@ Jack Tripper : Very encouraging story Jack, I’m interested to know more about your company and what services/product it provides.
Thanks.
Chris
on 01 Aug 12Not quite – if you work in corporate IT you can be flexible, innovative etc wearing a tie or not. But your ability to interact, and more importantly influence, the rest of the business who do wear a tie is affected by what you wear. They pay for their internal developers to have domain knowledge in addition to technical skills – and they need to be able to relate to you in order to effectively gain that knowledge.
At least in my experience in the UK…
Mike
on 02 Aug 12Wasn’t Jobs’ turtleneck born out of an attempt to introduce a company uniform at Apple?
This discussion is closed.