[olefoo]

Not every startup is a web application built around a CRUD model, seven years is a short time for bringing a new medical device to market; and a long time for a novelty ice cream flavor.

Time to market is not always as crucial as it seems; photo.net was doing photo sharing and social networking ten years before flickr got bought by Yahoo!, it's more than possible to be too early to market.

You don't go to VC's during the R&D phase, you go to them once you've worked out the technology risk and have something that could be taken to market with a sufficient application of money.

It's a good thing that there are inventors with long attention spans because we would still be chasing wildlife for dinner if there weren't.