Can’t Get Funded? Maybe There Are Better Ways

Today I joined Ian Sigalow, Jim Estill, and Mike Edelhart on a free webinar titled “Revolution in Venture Funding.” If you’re interested, here is the link to the permanent archive: http://myventurepad.com/93875/audio-archive-revolution-venture-funding.venture-funding-revolution

The sizzle in this one is the idea of crowd funding: specifically, there’s a bill in congress that would loosen up restrictions on small-time investments in startups, relaxing the constraint related to “accredited investors.” A lot of people are excited about that. Me too, but I’m also worried about opening up a floodgate of spams and scams. I have mixed feelings.

I’ll be adding in some suggestions for alternative funding and bootstrapping, including my own experience of funding a new product by giving a professional programming shop a percent of future revenue rather than percentage ownership in the company, and of getting a big company promising to purchase a product to fund the development. And, in the end, my experience of bootstrapping Palo Alto Software so that as it stands now, we own it outright, with no outside investors.

In that vein, I was searching the web and came up with this Smoothspan: Directory of Bootstrapped Companies listing some very well-known companies (37 Signals, Wordpress, Zoho, and several others) that were bootstrapped. And you can add Palo Alto Software to that list.

And I want to add that Ian and Jim are world-renown pros in venture capital investment, and Mike is a smooth moderator, so the discussion will also get into a lot of other angles on the main theme, revolution in funding. I hope you join us.

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