41–50 of 103 posts
So $50k in cash as opposed to $50k of investment for 33% of your company can be two very different things.
FWIW, half my family is from STL and there is definitely a difference in culture between the west coast and mid-west.
What seems likely to happen here is that adverse selection will allocate these grants to companies with poorer prospects than the total pool of startups, thus creating a track record of failure for the area.
Maybe a better approach would be to offer the grants to any startup nationwide, with the proviso that they employ N people in STL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how is it worth $50k to make it harder to raise the $500k+ you'll probably need to build your company?
1) you don't need $500k+ in funding to build a successful software company. 2) this is especially true living in a part of the country with a reasonable cost of living. Somewhere like Missouri, $50k is two reasonable years of runway for a single 20-something (even in a metro area like St Louis, you'll be able to rent for ~$400 .) 3) it's pretty ridiculous (and arrogant) to assume that nowhere else in the country can…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if you've ever had to write a business plan, you'll agree the projections for a startup end up being complete BS, but they make investors feel safe looking at a 20+ page document with lots of charts and numbers. That said, business plans can be useful and help the founders solidify their business model, predict costs, etc. If anything, it helps you get a vague idea of what to expect a few years down the road in…
business plans can be useful and help the founders solidify their business model, predict costs, etc. I would guess the vast majority of tech entrepreneurs would disagree with the implication that business plans are generally useful.
I think generally it's good to think about these things because the process is more valuable than the plan itself.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2011/12/06/st-louis-...
As for St. Louis as a tech start up location, I know there's a growing biotech scene bubbling up. St. Louis actually has the highest concentration of plant scientists in the world, and both Monsanto and WashU really pioneering some pretty incredible crop research.
Similarly, WashU is doing some truly extraordinary biomedical research, such as the newly opened Genomic and Pathology Services, where physicians from around the US can send cancer tissue samples to have genomic data read for prognostic and diagnostic purposes (http://www.gps.wustl.edu/).
To help catalyze the biotech spirit, the university offers a biotech Entrepreneurship pathway integrated with its biomedical/biological sciences PhD program which runs joint with the business school.(http://dbbs.wustl.edu/curstudents/SpecialEmphasisPathways/Pa...).
All that said and done, I can't imagine moving a tech start-up to STL. It seems like a company might organically grow out of existing work...
I always say that St. Louis is a nice place to be from. It's a nice place to raise a family. But I'm never going to move back. Or under extreme protest if my wife decides she wants to move back to be by family. There's just nothing interesting about St. Louis. White flight ruined the city in the sixties and highway 70 divides the majority black population (north) from the majority white population (south). So it's basically a segregated suburbia wrapped around a lifeless inner core. No one lives in the city. They drive there to work, drink and watch sports. Period.
I certainly wouldn't want to start a tech company there.
St. Louis has the wrong understanding of the problem. Money isn't the solution to building a tech community. Funding isn't usually the issue in getting a startup off the ground. The development of the tech community is how you entice entrepreneurs and technologists to your area. Entrepreneurs and developers flock to where there is a community of like minded individuals. Build the community and the people will come. O…
I was trying to work out where people stood on SOPA to get some idea of how much they understand internet startups. But I don't understand enough about Americna politics to get very far - all I have is that the Senator for Missouri, Claire McCaskill, was a SOPA co-sponsor. How do congress-people fit into this? There seem to be lots more of them...
So Missouri actually has two senators, McCaskill and Roy Blunt. "Congressmen" are usually members of the House of Representatives, and a state might have anywhere between 1 and about 50 or so.
For legislation to pass, it has to be passed by both houses and signed by the President, who's elected separately. If the President vetoes it, both houses can pass it over his head with a 2/3 majority. Constitutional amendments require a 2/3 majority and then some. And it's not like a parliamentary system where the whole party always votes the same way. The House in particular has often attracted idiosyncratic candidates who can only get elected in their particular district, and almost never vote with their party--guys like Ron Paul, James Traficant, and Zell Miller. Though of the three, only Ron Paul is still in office, and he's retiring soon.
The House and the Senate have different rules and regulations and traditions, and each can do things the other can't, but that's basically how it works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No VCs in St Louis.
Not true. I worked at one! However, it's fair to say there are no VCs in St. Louis that focus on consumer-facing technology companies. That said, St. Louis isn't impossible. Strangeloop STL is one of the hands-down, bar none, best conferences in the country each year; Slicehost did quite well for themselves from there; Jack Dorsey goes back home all the time (a co-founder of Square is from the Lou, and the swipe-powe…
By the time you move a team you may exceed $50,000 in expenses.
Anyone who is really serious will not take $50,000 to move to St. Louis.
And of course there are exceptions, like someone who has family in St. Louis, or someone who does know investors there etc.
I wonder whether groups like this hadn't ought to stop doing grant/investment programs like this. You can't just buy a startup community, at least not for any amount we've seen spent to date. It has to grow organically. What seems likely to happen here is that adverse selection will allocate these grants to companies with poorer prospects than the total pool of startups, thus creating a track record of failure for th…
I wouldn't be surprised if NYC does it. I think if you funded 40 companies at 250k each in grants then you could easily get a class as good as YC with the right people as judges, and considering they are already pumping 2 billion dollars into this Cornell Technion thing it seems likely that something like this will eventually happen.
I wonder whether groups like this hadn't ought to stop doing grant/investment programs like this. You can't just buy a startup community, at least not for any amount we've seen spent to date. It has to grow organically. What seems likely to happen here is that adverse selection will allocate these grants to companies with poorer prospects than the total pool of startups, thus creating a track record of failure for th…
I don't know that I've seen it attempted before.
More generally, I think this is a very interesting development. As developers move into the cloud, staying in places like silicon valley requires a burn that might not be necessary.
Verrry interesting.