OKCOOL

I went to my first Glasshouse “Second Chance Tuesday” event, I was booked in for the “Early Stage Funding Workshop” and the later event which was an interview with “Niklas Zennström who founded Kazza, Skype and Joost” (which I didn’t make in the end).

It was a very interesting afternoon hosted at the The Royal College of Physicians in Regents Park, the turn out was excellent. It never ceases to amaze me how many start ups there are at any one time looking for money.

The Panel

• Mattias Ljungman, partner Atomico Investments (co-founded by Niklas Zennström the headline speaker for the evening event)
• Sean Seaton-Rogers of Balderton Capital
• Simon Murdoch, CEO of Friendsabroad
• Richard Moross, Founder and CEO of MOO.com

This Q & A lasted about two hours and the discussion seemed quite informal despite the good turnout, with various questions coming in from the audience.

If I was ever to get investment for a project and could choose from where, Mattias from Atomico would be the VC of choice. As their money is “theirs” they apparently are not scared of risk and seem to have that air of coolness that I’ve never seen in a VC before.

The general consensus was that if you need to raise money; ask your friends, family and extended network first. Raise as much as you can then find yourself and angel based on the money you’ve already raised. Personally, I think if you’d ask your mum for her last £10k then you know that you have belief in the project…

Another well known point discussed at least every other question was “the Team” - without a decent team, you will not raise any money from a VC. MOO were lucky in that when Richard was looking for seed money is dad new Rob Klein, who’s son is Saul Kein who invests in tech start up’s (see point above). When they went to get Series A funding from a VC this gave them a massive boost, hence the speed of their funding. If you can’t get others to believe in your business early on, how do you expect to get somebody to invest a fair chunk of money?

Do you really need to raise money?

Are you building a technological showcase or a business? VC money is for scaling once you have a business. Richard Moross from MOO.com, raised his seed funding for MOO with a fixed idea of what he wanted business wise. Originally called “Pleasure Cards”, the business didn’t work for the first six months, so they re-branded, dropped the original idea of building their own network and focused on partners instead, such as Flickr. The point being - they had a business idea, they were not focused on building a social network or a piece of technology, they were not techies.

The Unstoppable Force

This was the last big point for me and the most important. When presenting your big idea to anyone, friends, family, VC’s, angel’s, etc You must come over as an unstoppable force - “whether you give me the money or not, I will make it”. This at first seems a little absurd, until you realise that making mistakes is good, resilience is attractive and having big goals that you are fixed on like a locomotive with no brakes is a sure fire way to at least get the pound signs flickering in a potential funders eyes.

Summing up

Overall this was a really god event and very useful to anyone interested in raising money of any sort. I always find these things quite invigorating, as Richard from MOO stated near the end - “You work just as hard running your small shop on a hight street, ten hours a day, six days a week, as you would starting up the next big global business”, to which the rest of the panel sighed, smiled and said “spoken like a true entrepreneur”.