Where are today’s challenges and opportunities in growing successful companies?
I think the challenges become much more severe in light of the scarcity of capital that is available to entrepreneurs, so that means that their differentiation has to be extraordinary. Unlike entrepreneurs of vintage 2006 and 2007 year funds, the 2009 vintage entrepreneur has to have a remarkable differentiation with their products and their ideas as to how they are going to build their business. They have to also absolutely demonstrate a monetization scheme that demonstrates cash-flow break-even in a relatively reasonable time. So the advantage aspects of presenting to a venture capitalist on the part of an entrepreneur becomes much more challenging because they not only have to be great technologists with a great market vision but the also have to be effectively incredibly strong “CFOs” in that they have to really understand the monetary measures of building their business. And they have to be believable in the sense that the investors buy into a break-even forecast. The challenge is
