Alexia Blogs

Over the past week, we met so many interesting people who gave the PV crew lots of practical business advice. Here’s a few of the nuggets for those of you who couldn’t make it. Sources for this advice are myriad, anyone who wants to be attributed to a nugget - drop a comment/mail.

1. Networking is like breathing. You do it regardless of payback. Somewhere down the line you may get to work with those you network with. It’s just all part of the habitat.
2. Build out relationships with investors and thought leaders without banging on their doors looking for cash. They are looking for ideas, insight and information. In return, they may be able to ’spot’ you later to their contacts. Warm introductions via mutual friends is always looked on more favourably then cold calls for VC cash.
3. Failure is a rite of passage. So many enterpreneurs we met failed in their previous businesses. Investors didn’t look on this as a risk, rather, a benefit. Failing at business teaches enterpreneurs lessons that they can use to avoid trouble in the future. This flies in the face of the Irish scene.
4. Build the product as much as humanly possible without looking for VC interest.
5. If you partner with another company to gain synergy traction, don’t let this distract you from your end goals.
6. A presence in the Valley is mandatory, even though you can have engineering operations in other parts of the world.
7. Is your product really a feature of an existing product or can it stand on it’s own feet? Investors want to see that a product has long-term viability and that it won’t be blown out of the water by a minor version increment pushed by big players in the same industry.
8. Patents do not constitute a viable business strategy. You need to build actual products.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 3:11 am and is filed under Blogging, Irish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.