So you got rejected? Good

4 points by sibmike 11 years ago | 2 comments

1. Now you know you KNOW you're on your own! 2. Next time you apply you will know that accelarator is not THE CHANCE to get to where you wonna be. Its just a SHORTCUT that you can take, or NOT.

Lately I have that feeling that people tend to approach accelerators like they approach Santa: "Dear Santa, I have been a flibustier all my life, and I have a bright idea, and I am really really smart. So please help me get my dreams come true..." Does not work.

If you THINK your idea is something that has to be done.

Just go for it. Make it your mission and do whatever it takes to accomplish it. Once I met those guys from UK in Siberia riding their bikes. I asked em WTF? Well, they told me, they are on a mission to go around the globe on bikes.. Why? They had no clue, I had no idea, but they have done it. (Find em "tough miles") Thats what a start up is, it may be even tougher.

(thats actually SCARY. Coz you will NOT have support from your friends, family, spouse and any reasonable person (they'll think you're nuts)).

IF you do it anyway, sometime you'll KNOW it works (coz you have clients and revenue and the growth). Then YOU decide if you want to take the SHORTCUT or not.

Hope that helps. Listen to Iron Maiden - The Trooper. There is always a chance.

Sincerely, Mike

PS: I will just go on painting Cathedrals to get the funding. Incorporte in HK. And launch our mob.app for the guys like us in July 2015:)

MichaelCrawford 11 years ago |

I'm not even applying for VC.

It's hard sometimes, when I hear about some guy getting millions of dollars for some idea that I once thought of, but the reason I don't pursue VC is that my actual experience with it leads me to be skeptical that it actually works.

Sometimes the VCs want to exercise control over the day to day operations of the company, then they demand the company do really stupid things that leads to it going out of business.

I'm not so sure it's such a good thing for a company to be publicly traded. Your "investors" at the IPO might not have any longer-term interest in the success of your company then the next millisecond, this because the reason we really DO need to Occupy Wall Street is the popularity of Sub-Millisecond Precision High Speed Trading.

I worked for an electronic medical records startup in 1996. We were one of the very first. Our product was not meant to go online IN ANY WAY. While we were a client-server shop, the server was intended to be in the same hospital as all the clients.

Even so, one of our VCs popped by the office one day to ask what our "Internet Strategy" was.

This had the eventual result that "KnowMed Systems" changed its name to "iKnowMed".

-- Misha

jtfairbank 11 years ago | |

VC's are big picture people. Asking about an internet strategy was a good move- they largely predicted the EMR record systems in place today. Doesn't mean you have to change your immediate focus, they just wanted to make sure you were thinking about it.