Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Tim Oren appears to be suffering from sympathy. An unusual affliction for a VC. A handful of reasons why, Mr. Entrepreneur, your amazingly cool new innovation isn’t going to get funding:

1. Cool demo! Great price point, what a leap forward! Man making stuff like this dependable is really hard work. You probably can’t see that, having just moved so fast. You know the incumbent is always improving. Sorry, I think we’ll pass.
2. Cool! - oh - It’s so cool that pretty soon it will be a ‘must have’ and the platform vendor will swallow you. No durable business here. Next.
3. Neat! - oh - Sadly your customers are too smart. Even if you get past the damn designers (NIH etc.) you won’t get by the risk adversion of the project manager.
4. Your customer’s too powerful and too slow. They take years to release a new product and they never leave any real money on the table for the component providers.
5. Customers would love that! - oh - The channel’s doesn’t care. The channel sells by subscription: i.e. they want zero up front cost, sticky features, and value delivered in dribble. You don’t fit that model; your toast.
6. Ha, that’s clever. The early adopters will love it. But, I just can’t see how the late adopters are ever going to see that as anything but added complexity.

Needless to say Tim put’s this all in a much more professional and accurate way.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2004 at 9:46 am and is filed under business modeling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.