Category — VC

This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 startup school at Stanford by Ycombinator.

Nice and inspiring lessons if you are serious for starting a startup.

My friend Yathindran came across these links which keep a track of latest postings on some of the famous blogs related to startups and venture capital.
For startup news checkout
http://startups.alltop.com/
and for venture capital news checkout
http://venturecapital.alltop.com/

Even if you are not interested in this stuff, do give it a shot. You will sure find something of interest.

The toughest part in a startup is building the prototype of your idea to prove that it works. You will need angel investment to keep the startup going at this phase. If you have a great idea, and you will like to get some early stage funding, then you should try your luck with mumbai angels

By their own admission, they are focused on seed stage and early stage companies with strong teams, defensible technologies or services and well defined product to market plans.

Mumbai angels has many members with prior Silicon Valley experience. So you can expect some really useful advice and handholding as well. More importantly they invest in indivdual capacity and not as a fund.

I have been working on , rather I should say Thinking on loads of ideas for starting a startup since past more than one year but it’s only now that I realized where I was wrong. I always had many ideas…some of them really good (I can say that because when I did some research after having an idea, I found that someone had already just started a startup based on a similar idea … and most of them are doing good) but my fault was that I never executed any of my ideas… I just thought upon it , discussed with friends, did some research and by then I would have another idea and I thought it better to be what I had started on. So I think it’s not the idea but its execution and completion that is important.
Read this post on ideas vs judgement and execution to get the point in a better way.

Have you ever felt that you have a killer idea, but you are not able to work on it due to lack of funding. And you think that writing business plans is not worth your time. Well here is a good news. You do NOT need a business plan to get funded.

Y Combinator is now accepting applications for the summer 2008 funding cycle. Here is what they say about their way of evaluating investment ideas.

How do we choose who to fund? The people in your group are what matter most to us. We look for brains, motivation, and a sense of design. Experience is helpful but not critical.

Your idea is important too, but mainly as evidence that you can have good ideas. Most successful startups change their idea substantially.

The best part comes towards the end.
We don’t expect you to have a formal business plan yet. All you have to do is fill out our application.

To know why I am so excited about this, look at the past companies they have funded.
Reddit, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Virtualmin, Buxfer, Octopart, Heysan, Justin.TV, I’m In Like With You, SocialMoth, Xobni, Versionate, Adpinion, Anywhere.FM, Fuzzwich, Bountii, Auctomatic, Disqus, Draftmix, Webmynd, RescueTime, Reble, Heroku, Tipjoy, AddHer, and 8AWeek. It can not get better than this.