Full House in Sunnyvale This Morning
October 21st, 2008 skmurphy
We’ve added a Bootstrappers Breakfast Meetup Group to complement this blog, the LinkedIn group, and the CentralDesktop private workspace (the latter two are available to folks who have attended two meetings). It brought a number of first time folks to this morning’s breakfast: we ended up with 16 folks around the table at Coco’s. We had a nice comment from one first time attendee named Beena who was exploring how to start a non-profit to address the needs of the spouses of immigrants to Silicon Valley:
Anyone who has a high tech start up can attend this meeting. Depending on which stage of your business, you will get useful inputs from other members based on their experience that can help you improve your situation.
There was some good news from a returning member who had just landed a contract with the Army for documentation generation and management tools and was staffing up and another who has reached a level of business that has gotten the interest of several early stage VC’s; his team has started some second round interviews despite the downturn. It was a broad ranging group discussion and a number of one on one conversations after our 9am wrap.
I mentioned Sequoia Capital’s “Good Times RIP” presentation during the breakfast, it’s available here:
- http://www.slideshare.net/eldon/sequoia-capital-on-startups-and-the-economic-downturn-presentation?type=powerpoint
- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/1822343/Sequoia-Venture-Capital-Warning-to-CEOs
Comments from three posts plus some interesting follow on discussions on Hacker News as well.
- A CEO’s Sequoia Meeting Notes on Lance Weatherby (excerpted from the Funded)
- Sequoia Capital: Armchair Quarterbacks on 37Signals
- Sequoia’s Advice is Good Advice Any Time on VentureHacks
- Which had the following excellent advice
“In good times and bad, startups should be asking themselves the same questions: - What’s our runway?
- What experiments are we running to extend our runway? (e.g. chasing revenue, raising capital, taking debt, writing grant proposals, cutting burn, grabbing market share in the hopes that it will help us raise capital later, et cetera)
- How long will we try the experiments before we switch to plan B?
- What’s plan B?”
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2 Comments Add your own
1. BootstrappersBreakfast &r&hellip | October 29th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
[…] I mentioned Sequoia Capital’s “Good Times RIP” at the last breakfast and elaborated on it in “Full House in Sunnyvale This Morning” posting, adding pointers to commentary from Hacker News, 37 Signals, and Venture Hacks. I was delighted to discover Ho Nam’s Altos Ventures Musings blog and his “RIP Good Times? A Different Perspective” posting about a presentation he put together for an entrepreneur conference last week in Reno. His slideshare presentation is here: RIP Good Times? A Different Perspective […]
2. SKMurphy » Overnigh&hellip | November 9th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
[…] I think it’s unfortunate but a lot what’s written about Silicon Valley entrepreneurship is actually part of a sales pitch or positioning for the venture ecosystem. There is a lot of advice that’s designed to encourage the entrepreneur to start negotiations with an attorney or a VC in a very poor position. The Venture Hacks blog is a notable counter example: their posts on term sheet negotiations are delightfully practical and lately they have provided some excellent advice on bootstrapping and customer development. But many articles and blog posts are designed to convince an entrepreneur to seek early validation from a VC firm instead of a customer, or lately to take a worse deal because “Good Times RIP” (or maybe not.) […]
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