Crowd Funding, Micro-funding, New Approach for Investors - Alternatives to Wall Street

(3) Negotiation: Once you’re sold on the founders and have found enough evidence to suggest the business will succeed, the next step is hammering out finances. How much money does this founder want/need? What kind of valuation would they accept? You’re not going to finalize things at this stage, but roughing out a basic set of terms is pretty straightforward.   "Money will chase opportunity."  Note: It’s absolutely critical that you remain 100 percent honest during this entire process. If you represent to startups that you work for a VC firm, or suggest any relationship that isn’t recognized by the VC, you’ll instantly be blackballed. Likewise, don’t make claims about being on the team when talking to the VCs. Clearly explain what you’re doing to all parties. When in doubt, disclose. Your reputation is in the balance.

(4) Financing: Now you might be thinking this is where my crazy notion of being an independent VC will fall apart. Unless you can bankroll the company independently, you’ll need to find some monied investors who are willing to take a risk, right?  This sounds hard, but money will chase opportunity. If you can find compelling companies, explain why the market is attractive, why this team is equipped to dominate that market and present a framework for a deal, there will be plenty of angels or firms willing to cut a check or, at least, take a meeting.  You’ll want to be on the radar of these folks before asking them to look at any of  your “deals,” but after a couple of high-quality intros, they’ll be eager to hear from you.

Much more to read and understand in the article before you attempt this being a VC without the Capital, but I can professionally tell you that it is a worthwhile read.

Cybersecurity companies have had an easy time raising money in Silicon Valley over the last few years. But investors are starting to ask about profit and sustainability.    A funny thing happened to Orion Hindawi while he was raising $120 million for his cybersecurity start-up last month: Investors asked him about profits.  A year ago, Mr. Hindawi raised $90 million, followed by an additional $52 million this year from the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Investors were willing to place a $900 million valuation on his company, called Tanium, without so much as a glance at revenue or profit margin.   This time, not so. As he made the rounds with investors like Institutional Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price, Mr. Hindawi said, he was asked to show sales and profit margins. “A lot of the funders we spoke with are starting to get really scared,” he said. “This time the questions were, ‘Is this a sustainable business? Do you guys actually make money?’ ”

Silicon Valley’s sudden distaste for the I.P.O. — rooted in part in Wall Street’s skepticism of new tech stocks — may be the single most important psychological shift underlying the current tech boom. Staying private affords start-up executives the luxury of not worrying what outsiders think and helps them avoid the quarterly earnings treadmill.  -  It also means Wall Street is doing what it failed to do in the last tech boom: using traditional metrics like growth and profitability to price companies. Investors have been tough on Twitter, for example, because its user growth has slowed. They have been tough on Box, the cloud-storage company that went public last year, because it remains unprofitable. And the e-commerce company Zulily, which went public last year, was likewise punished when it cut its guidance for future sales.

Scott Kupor, the managing partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and his colleagues said in a recent report that despite all the attention start-ups have received in recent years, tech stocks are not seeing unusually high valuations. In fact, their share of the overall market has remained stable for 14 years, and far off the peak of the late 1990s.  -  That unwillingness to cut much slack to young tech companies limits risk for regular investors. If the bubble pops, the unwashed masses, if that’s what we are, aren’t as likely to get washed out.

Read and Heed

According to data from the Kauffman Foundation, 2015 has marked the first year startup activity has been on the rise since the Great Recession. In fact, it’s soaring — the numbers show we’re living through the biggest upswing in new companies, products, business deals, and jobs in the past twenty years.  That makes it sound like now is the perfect time to bring your million dollar idea to market — but how is that even done?   -  1st off, begin by casting aside any fears that you can’t make a dent in the tech universe with little computer prowess.“We’re seeing more and more people enter the tech space because the definition of tech continues to grow,” says Michele Markey, vice president of Kauffman FastTrac, a global network of advisors helping entrepreneurs launch and grow companies. She’s seen everything from medical devices to mobile apps launch from Main Street as much as Silicon Valley, and that’s a trend many expect to continue.    1. Eying the competition:  It may not sound as exciting as a weekend-long hackathon or a giving a flashy presentation to a bunch of investors, but the reality is that most startups live and die based on early research. Scoping out the competition is vital to understanding where there’s an opportunity to make a move. This can involve everything from dissecting competing products to improve upon their designs or simply mapping out their locations to find a new way to reach underserved customers.   2. Finding and defining customers:  Markey says startup founders also conduct research by hitting the bricks and talking to would-be customers about their ideas. “A smart entrepreneur needs to figure out where their sweet spot in the marketplace is,” she says. “Who is that customer that’s going to use the product, pay the money, and maybe be the repeat user?  

3. Shoring up intellectual property:   Padlocking your product or service with an array of patents, trademarks, or copyrights can sound terribly dull, but the truth is it’s one of the most important steps to ensuring a budding company’s success. Without these protections, a competitor can swoop in and copy an idea without having to pay a dime for all the hard work done until this point.  And finally, startups are also wise to copyright their reproducible works. Whether it’s an paperback, and e-book, or even an image, if it can be duplicated, it should be protected. That may sound like a publishing industry problem rather than a startup issue, but as TechCrunch noted last year, it only took four hours for copyright law to crush one particular startup’s dreams.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• EMV cards are being rolled out with an embedded microchip for added security. The microchip carries out real-time risk assessments on a person’s card purchase activity based on the card user’s profile. The chip also generates dynamic cryptograms when the card is inserted into a payment terminal. Because these cryptograms change with every purchase, it makes it difficult for fraudsters to make counterfeit cards that can be used for in-store transactions.
• To bolster security throughout the payments chain encryption of payments data is being widely implemented. Encryption degrades valuable data by using an algorithm to translate card numbers into new values. This makes it difficult for fraudsters to harvest the payments data for use in future transactions.
• Point-to-point encryption is the most tightly defined form of payments encryption. In this scheme, sensitive payment data is encrypted from the point of capture at the payments terminal all the way through to the gateway or acquirer. This makes it much more difficult for fraudsters to harvest usable data from transactions in stores and online. 
• Tokenization increases the security of transactions made online and in stores. Tokenization schemes assign a random value to payment data, making it effectively impossible for hackers to access the sensitive data from the token itself. Tokens are often “multiuse,” meaning merchants don’t have to force consumers to re-enter their payment details. Apple Pay uses an emerging form of tokenization. 
• 3D Secure is an imperfect answer to user authentication online. One difficulty in fighting online fraud is that it is hard to tell whether the person using card data is actually the cardholder. 3D Secure adds a level of user authentication by requiring the customer to enter a passcode or biometric data in addition to payment data to complete a transaction online. Merchants who implement 3D Secure risk higher shopping-cart abandonment.