Venture capitalist Randy Komisar
suggested today that Web startups may not actually need his money — at
least, not right away.
Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, reached that conclusion in a roundabout way during a question-and-answer session at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco. His main point was a piece of common entrepreneurial advice: To paraphrase Komisar’s new book on the topic, startups need to “get to plan B.” They need to cycle through different ideas with as little time and money as possible to discover which of their assumptions are wrong. For startups in fields like biotech or cleantech or enterprise technology, that process may take months or years of work, and it probably requires sizable funding. But at a consumer Internet company, things should be much faster and cheaper.
“So why do we need venture capitalists?” Komisar asked. “They may not be as important.” That means he might tell an early-stage Web startup looking for funding, “You get my money later, at a higher valuation, when you need to accelerate a good idea to a great one.”
Another interesting — and quotable — part of the discussion covered Komisar’s idea of a startup’s “analog” and “antilog.” Every startup idea involves a few “leap of faith” assumptions. As entrepreneurs explore those assumptions, he said, they should look for companies that successfully built on those ideas (analogs), as well as companies that used those ideas and failed (antilogs).
To read the full, original article click on this link: Kleiner Perkins’ Randy Komisar: Maybe Web startups don’t need venture capital | VentureBeat
Author: Anthony Ha
