| > I'm doing serious work and my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in the past five years. I just want to burn some HN points here to tell you that you're not alone, and that there are a lot of other people out there that are terribly frustrated by this. Investors are primarily in it to make money. They're optimizing for returns. When you have a choice between a company that will spend relatively little capital and has a chance to make a lot of money, $5 at a time, from millions of people, in a short period of time, and then get sold to some other megacorporation at a valuation that's detached from reality, versus a company with higher capital needs and a 20-year roadmap to becoming an industry heavyweight ... well, you choose the first one. The horde of "business consultants" (coaches, advisors, what-have-you) aren't much better. I went through a period of intense naivete that involved trying those people out. I would try anything that might have a chance at accelerating my business. I have never before been charged so much to receive so little truly useful advice, from so many people so hell-bent on violating the very first rule of problem solving ("understand the problem"), and so inclined to insult me or my goals. They're all just doing the same thing as the VCs, but at smaller, pitiable scales: they're focusing first-and-foremost on making a buck. Sometimes the situation leaves me feeling bitter. As a hopeless idealist and an obsessive problem-solver, I can't help but to habitually look at the world around me and see in its place the potential for the future that so many people with resources claim to be interested in while being interested first and foremost in making a quick profit. |
The consumer internet startups FF funded were often intended to become something more than they turned into. Slide was supposed to be about cross-site predictive analytics on a massive scale. Silly widgets were just the data capture vector. Frogmetrics (my FF-funded YC startup) had similar ambitions for the real world. Both companies fell way short of our secret ambitions, but not for lack of effort.
Also, many of FF's most interesting investments aren't on the site for secrecy reasons.
One more anecdote:
Last year, when I told some VC friends that I was working on strong AI as a startup, they laughed. When I told Luke and Brian at Founders Fund, they said they wanted to invest. It's obviously too early to say whether we'll meet the same fate as past AI companies, but we're off to a good start (http://vicariousinc.com/), and that's thanks to Founders Fund taking the kinds of risks they discuss in the article.