New Small Scale VC's
A couple of months ago the matra went like this: any investment below £2 million is not worth the time of a venture capitalist. But I know people who built cool webservices with either no, or very little capital. Meaning they start through a mixture of their own time, credit cards (if a bit American), and help from OS developers, or developers in Eastern Europe, or India.
Yet, if those services want to professionalize just £ 20 000 could do wonders. And now two players have entered the market. Charles River Ventures has started the not very sexy named CRV QuickStart Seed Funding Program, which provides loans of up to £ 250 000, which can later be converted into stock.
YCombinator seems a bit cooler – they provide very small investments for three months, for in between 3 and 4 people behind a project of just $2000 each. And they need to move to the Bay Area (SF). This almost seems like a grant for passionate kids to make their dream a reality.
But where is the true web 2.0 investment aggregator? The distributed investment vehicle powering investment through communities?
More also at TechCrunch.
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[...] I just came again across an article I read a while ago, but never got around to posting it. One of the most inspiring and insightful articles on how business could and should change by learning from Open Source Software has been written by Paul Graham, the founder of YCombinator (we reported about the lean VC model here). [...]
[...] OpenBusiness has followed for a while YCombinator’s approach to VC investment and wondererd why nobody in Europe is doing something similar. In a nutshell: Give a small amount of cash, provide lots of mentoring and networking opportunities, take some equity and hope for a big hit. This way YCombinator seeded Digg for example. [...]