Posted by David S. Rose on August 10th, 2014
Take your choice (these are both real, honest-to-God pitches, and I’ve got the originals in my possession):
Contestant A CluelessCo is an internet startup company seeking $2 million of equity financing to fund our company for at least one year. CluelessCo will become the main consumer outlet for the internet, digital cable and satellite TV, and cell phones and PDAs.
Posted by David S. Rose on July 24th, 2014
The most useful meetings with an investor are ones where going in everyone understands that there may actually be a rational reason for the investor to be interested. So even if my own mother asked me to meet with you, and you were pitching me a biotech opportunity for a $10 million investment at a $90 million valuation, I might
Posted by David S. Rose on May 11th, 2014
There is no such thing as a full-time angel investor (or if there is, I’ve never met one.)
If you mean someone investing mostly other people’s money through a seed fund, they are venture capitalists, and their days are spent like other VCs, meeting with prospective investments, mentoring portfolio companies, raising money from limited partners, negotiating deals, and so forth.
If
Posted by David S. Rose on April 13th, 2014
SIIA (the US Software and Information Industry Association) named Gust the Best Collaboration Solution of 2013, at the gala during the All About The Cloud annual conference in San Francisco on Thursday.
Posted by David S. Rose on February 23rd, 2014
The answer is no, yes, and it’s irrelevant. 🙂
Back in the days of the dinosaurs, my first software company was in the wireless communications space (when that meant “pagers”, not “smartphones”), and our product let you type a message on your computer and send it to a pager, using a very simple protocol known as “TAP”. We were—by far—the market leader in
Posted by David S. Rose on January 31st, 2014
Large and growing market Real domain expertise Provable product need Scalable business model Competitive advantage Platform/partnership/bizdev/API strategy External validation (ideally traction and/or passionate customers) Viable business structure and cap table Reasonable valuation Proven team (tech/product/design/marketing/sales/domain/etc.)
But most important of all, it must have an entrepreneur on whom I’m willing to bet. And the attributes I look for in that entrepreneur are:
Posted by David S. Rose on January 23rd, 2014
This is obviously a softball question that I’ve been Asked to Answer, as I’m the Founder/CEO of Gust. The answer, of course, is Gust—because that’s exactly the purpose behind the platform!
Gust is the infrastructure that underlies much of the professional world of early stage finance. It is used by hundreds of thousands of companies in 195 countries to organize all of
Posted by David S. Rose on May 14th, 2012
It’s pretty amazing that the video is from five years ago and has been viewed something like 500,000 times.
Even though in the years since, I’ve done a lot more pitch coaching with a lot higher production value, it turns out that there is not much I would change in the content all these years later. Good luck with your
Posted by David S. Rose on September 30th, 2011
Posted by David S. Rose on September 13th, 2011
Today’s unveiling of Gust, the global infrastructure for early stage entrepreneurial financing, is a milestone that has been seven years in the making. When we originally conceived of a single platform tying together the world’s entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists and supporting organizations, it quickly became apparent that the biggest challenge had nothing to do with technology. Instead it was
