Each year entrepreneurs pitch Venture Capital firms in hopes that their startup company or business expansion will get funded by them. The vast majority do not get funded. Furthermore, “getting funding” almost always means the entrepreneur must sell a sizable piece of his company to the VC.

Getting funded by a VC is a dream, but it can easily turn into a nightmare for both the entrepreneur and the VC. Because the VC owns a piece of the company, if further rounds of funding are needed in the future it could mean diluting only the founder’s ownership, depending on how the contracts were setup. It’s not too uncommon for founders to eventually wind up with a minority stake in their own company and to lose control of it. For the VC, there’s a big chance of failure. They usually need an exit strategy, such as taking the company public to sell its shares to the marketplace or to sell the company to a private party. But before they sell it, they need to try to juice up the revenue of the company to max out the sales price. When maxing out revenue becomes the primary unconditional focus, it’s easy for the business to go in a very different direction than the founder had intended.

The above horrors can happen when an entrepreneur does get funding. Let’s not forget that most entrepreneurs seeking capital just don’t get funded.

These are problems. And yet the world has a way about finding solutions to problems and getting them to those who can benefit. Sometimes the solution can be so incredibly simple that it’s hard to believe. In the case of funding a small business, the solution I see is a matter of [Read more...]