How to accumulate funds in the early stages of entrepreneurship

From the capital point of view, entrepreneurship is like an exam. The way to get rich is not to have all the shares, but to maximize the chances of success.　　So it is better to use some shares in exchange for a higher chance of success. To make any entrepreneurial activity happen, the first thing you need is to start funding. Some startups are self-sufficient, like Microsoft, but most do not.　　I think it is wise to find the right investors, because depending on their own money to start a business, you can basically only be a consulting company, and this type of business is difficult to convert into an industry business. From the capital point of view, entrepreneurship is like an exam. The way to get rich is not to have all the shares, but to maximize the chances of success.　　So it is better to use some shares in exchange for a higher chance of success. For most professional hackers, finding investors is a mysterious and frightening thing. In fact, let me say, this is a simple and boring job. First you need tens of thousands of dollars of start-up money to develop your software prototype costs.　　This kind of investment is called "seed money", and it's just a small investment, and getting them is really simple: just ask someone else to do it. Generally speaking, you can get the seed money from the independent investors, which is called "Angel Investment", the investor is the person who once relied on technology to start a successful business.　　In the seed phase, investors do not require you to have a detailed business plan, they will make a quick decision based on your presentation, and sometimes the money will be in place within a week-just a simple contract. The money we started Viaweb was a 10,000-dollar angel investment from our friend Julian, and he gave us more help. As a corporate lawyer, he used to be a CEO of a company, so we got a lot of advice from him about doing business and saved us the hassle of dealing with our own legal problems.　　In addition, he brought us another two angel investors to solve our next financial problems. Some angel investors, especially those with a technical background, may trust your business plan with just one beta software or an oral presentation.　　But most investors will want a detailed plan to figure out what they are investing in. In retrospect, when our angel investor asked me for a business plan, I did make a lot of worries about it. "Business Plan", it obviously involves "business" this novelty, so I think I have to refer to some books to learn how to write it, but the book is completely unable to find the answer. Basically, investors will want you to give them a general description of what you want to do and how it can make money, and your resume. Just sit down and write down the hopes that you've told others.　　It doesn't take a whole day to do this, and the most important thing is that you can get a lot of inspiration in the process of writing down your plans. After you get your investment, you have to build a company.It's not difficult to start a company in general, but the problem is that it's hard to decide who will be your partner and how much you share. It is not difficult to share two equal levels of people, but when you have several partners working in different fields and levels, it will be extremely painful to allocate shares properly.　　But in any case, as long as you decide, this thing will not change. I have no good advice for this matter. All I can say is that you should do your best and try to do it well.　　But to be honest, I have a practical experience that when everyone feels they have a small loss of shares relative to their pay, your equity allocation is the best. Of course, in addition to cooperation, there are still a lot of things to do to start a company. Insurance, business license, labor compensation, and the IRS. I'm not sure what else is on the list, because our company skipped the whole thing ... When we got an investment that was enough to start a business in 1996, we got a great CFO who put all the arrangements in place. In any case, even if you don't do everything you need to do to start a company, no one will come rushing to arrest you. This is a great thing for the entrepreneur, or the ghost dares to start a business. [Page] from the capital point of view, entrepreneurship is like an exam. The way to get rich is not to have all the shares, but to maximize the chances of success.　　So it is better to use some shares in exchange for a higher chance of success. To make any entrepreneurial activity happen, the first thing you need is to start funding. Some startups are self-sufficient, like Microsoft, but most do not.　　I think it is wise to find the right investors, because depending on their own money to start a business, you can basically only be a consulting company, and this type of business is difficult to convert into an industry business. From the capital point of view, entrepreneurship is like an exam. The way to get rich is not to have all the shares, but to maximize the chances of success.　　So it is better to use some shares in exchange for a higher chance of success. For most professional hackers, finding investors is a mysterious and frightening thing. In fact, let me say, this is a simple and boring job. First you need tens of thousands of dollars of start-up money to develop your software prototype costs.　　This kind of investment is called "seed money", and it's just a small investment, and getting them is really simple: just ask someone else to do it. Generally speaking, you can get the seed money from the independent investors, which is called "Angel Investment", the investor is the person who once relied on technology to start a successful business.　　In the seed phase, investors do not require you to have a detailed business plan, they will make a quick decision based on your presentation, and sometimes the money will be in place within a week-just a simple contract. The money we started Viaweb was 10,000 dollars from our friend Julian.Yuan Angel Investment, and he gave us more help. As a corporate lawyer, he used to be a CEO of a company, so we got a lot of advice from him about doing business and saved us the hassle of dealing with our own legal problems.　　In addition, he brought us another two angel investors to solve our next financial problems. Some angel investors, especially those with a technical background, may trust your business plan with just one beta software or an oral presentation.　　But most investors will want a detailed plan to figure out what they are investing in. In retrospect, when our angel investor asked me for a business plan, I did make a lot of worries about it. "Business Plan", it obviously involves "business" this novelty, so I think I have to refer to some books to learn how to write it, but the book is completely unable to find the answer. Basically, investors will want you to give them a general description of what you want to do and how it can make money, and your resume. Just sit down and write down the hopes that you've told others.　　It doesn't take a whole day to do this, and the most important thing is that you can get a lot of inspiration in the process of writing down your plans. After you get your investment, you have to build a company. It's not difficult to start a company in general, but the problem is that it's hard to decide who will be your partner and how much you share. It is not difficult to share two equal levels of people, but when you have several partners working in different fields and levels, it will be extremely painful to allocate shares properly.　　But in any case, as long as you decide, this thing will not change. I have no good advice for this matter. All I can say is that you should do your best and try to do it well.　　But to be honest, I have a practical experience that when everyone feels they have a small loss of shares relative to their pay, your equity allocation is the best. Of course, in addition to cooperation, there are still a lot of things to do to start a company. Insurance, business license, labor compensation, and the IRS. I'm not sure what else is on the list, because our company skipped the whole thing ... When we got an investment that was enough to start a business in 1996, we got a great CFO who put all the arrangements in place. In any case, even if you don't do everything you need to do to start a company, no one will come rushing to arrest you. This is a great thing for the entrepreneur, or the ghost dares to start a business. [Page] If you get an investment and don't start the company in time, some of your partners will have the idea of going out on their own first. It happens all the time, and it's dangerous for you. So when you decide to start a business and assign a stake, you should have all the partners sign an agreement to place all of their creative ownership in the company so that everyone can onlyServe the company. (If we're in a movie, the next scene will be with ominous music) when you do this, first you have to ask what agreements each partner has signed. One of the most troubling problems for startups is intellectual property.　　We used to have it, and it almost brought us down, closer than any competitor ... When we were about to be taken over by another company, we found a partner who earlier signed an agreement to hand over his creative ownership to a major company in exchange for a scholarship to enter the university. In theory, this thing means that someone else is a big part of our software property. So we have to take a brake on the takeover to deal with the problem. Given that we were about to be acquired, our cash flow dropped to a very low level, and the problem was that we had to replenish the funds to keep the company running.　　But it's hard to find investors when you have intellectual property problems in your company, and no one is willing to risk it. When our investors learned that we were short of cash, we did some targeted activities immediately. I do not want to dwell on this, except to tell you that "angel investment" is just a nice name.　　The founder was asked to leave the company after leaving a detailed server operation to the investor, and when that happened, the acquirer took it as a bargaining weight. These problems were finally miraculously resolved. Investors came back, our company got a new valuation, and the big company gave us a statement that we didn't have title to our software, and 6 months later we got a much higher price than the previous company.　　So it's a happy ending, though my life may have been shortened by a few years.　　Do not make our mistakes and understand the intellectual property rights of each partner before you start a business. When you build your company, you may find it presumptuous to knock on the door of a rich family and ask them to provide tens of thousands of loans for your little ideas. But if you're in the rich man's shoes, it's easy to make it happen. They're all looking for good investment opportunities, and if your project really has money, they're actually willing to make money.　　Even they might think: Is this guy going to be the next Google? Usually angel investment is a fair deal for entrepreneurs. They share equity and long-term benefits with you, and their shares depend on what you expect from your company. If you trade x for Y, it means you're pricing your entire company.　　For example, if you use a 5% stake in exchange for 100,000 dollars, that means your company is worth 2 million dollars. As for how you judge your company's value, there is no fixed method. In a sense, startups are a gamble. When I started my business, I didn't realize it. Julian thinks we should price the company millions of dollars, and IIt would be absurd to think that converting our only thousands of lines of code into millions of dollars.　　Finally, we positioned the company at 1 million, because Julian said that no one had an aftertaste of corporate investment worth less than 1 million. At the time I didn't realize that the value of our company was not determined by the code we were writing at that time.　　It also depends on the right ideas and ideas, and the many efforts that we have made. The next step in raising money is to engage real venture capital firms. But don't wait until your money is bottoming out, and VCs make decisions that are slow and they take months.　　And when you're dealing with them, it's best not to have cash shortages. It's much more troublesome to get money from VCs than to get money from investors. The money is usually millions, so the whole deal takes more time and energy to face the heavier work. [Page] sometimes VCs want to set up their chosen CEO in the company because they feel you need a leader with a business background and maturity. Maybe sometimes it's right, but Bill Gates has no experience and no business background when he started from scratch, and he looks good. Jobs used a mature, business-background person to manage his company, almost destroying it. So I think those guys who are so mature and have a business background get a high estimate.　　We used to call them "news," because they all combed clean hair, spoke in a deep, confident voice, and knew nothing except what the teleprompter showed. We have been in touch with a lot of VCs, but decided to rely entirely on Angels to invest in our business. Mainly because we were afraid that a famous VC would use a newscaster to pick us up. If he's just window-dressing there, it's okay. But what if he wants to interfere with the operation of the company? This is going to be a disaster, and our software is so complicated that it's impossible for him to understand.　　The core value of our company is in advanced technology, so basically all strategic decisions are based on the development of our technology, for which we do not need the outside to have a lot of tongue. That's one of the reasons our software didn't go public. In 1998, our CFO once advised me to do it. At that time, you can become a good company selling real products with profit by making a web portal like dog food monopoly.　　But I'm afraid it's going to lead us to a news-like "Wall Street accent." I'm glad to see Google giving this trend a mouth. When they went public, they ignored the so-called Wall Street emphasis, and Wall Street investors didn't buy their shares, and now everyone on Wall Street wants to kick their asses.　　They will learn to value the next opportunity, profitable things they always learn quickly. You'll have a lot of opportunities to deal with VCs more than you think. Because there are a lot of companies in the world, and according to me and theirThe experience of Tao--and you will learn it--is a seller's market.　　Even now, there is an endless amount of free money in the market looking for good investment opportunities. VCs are pyramid-shaped, with celebrities like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins at the top, but there are a lot of guys out there that you don't hear about, and the common denominator is that one dollar is worth a dollar. Most VCs will tell you that they not only provide the money but also offer relationships and advice, if you're talking to Vinod Khosla or John Doerr or Mike Moritz, that's right. But the advice and relationships are expensive, and you'll find that their IQ is plummeting in line with the size of their positions. From the top of the pyramid you will have to talk to a banker who only knows how to get new knowledge from Wired magazine. (Do your products use XML?) (Don't understand, programmers understand stupid things, in short, the meaning of the Martians) so I suggest that you remain skeptical about the value of the so-called experience and relationship.　　Basically, VCs are just a source of money, and I tend to talk to anyone who gives the fastest money. You may not know how much to tell the wind to vote about you. Given that they may one day invest in your competitors, you should try to be honest. Good planning does not require faceless, but it does not require a header name. In short, as many VCs say, their interest in entrepreneurs is greater than their interest in the project. They talk to you about your plan mainly to judge you, not your idea.　　So as long as you act to understand what you are doing, you can also keep a little privacy. Communicate with as many VCs as possible, even if you don't want their money. Because: a they can bring in people who want to buy your company, B. If you act strong, they are afraid to invest in your competitors. If you just want them to meet you instead of asking them for money, the most efficient way to get in touch with VCs is to show them at some start-up companies ' fairs.