The actual sense of the title of this
thread is just not true. My experience
is that plenty of information technology (IT)
VCs are plenty eager to talk seriously
without any introduction except an e-mail
from a startup founder.
What I learned, to my great surprise, is
that apparently the VCs are under some quite
severe constraints. So, they are forced,
from whatever, to ignore essentially everything
about a project I learned doing projects
in business, academic research, and for the
US DoD.
Instead, for an IT project they
want to see, as about the second thing,
some running software. That there might be
a lot of crucial work before such software,
work that makes the software itself trivial,
just is not in their experience and is nearly
always way beyond their nearly always
rather meager technical backgrounds.
So, for the
running software, they want to "play with it",
likely essentially to look at the user interface
(UI) and estimate how well many users will like it.
For more, they want to see some forms of
'traction' which apparently they use as a
surrogate for accounting data traditional in
commercial bank lending or private equity
investing.
For a deeper look, they like simplistic
'patterns' based on past history
of IT VC taken fairly narrowly.
So,
they have a fundamental problem seeing
or evaluating something that is really
new, even if, say, the US DoD problem
sponsors could see the power and value.
So, I have a list of 40+ VCs eager to
"play with" my software when it goes live.
I got an introduction to none of them and
for each of them just sent e-mail. They
responded with e-mail and at least one
phone conversation. They are impressed
enough with the 'market', the 'technology'
to the (meager) extent they and
value it, and the goals. Then they just
want to see it working, hopefully also
with 'traction'. How much? One VC
firm said 100,000 unique users a month.
With my site that might be $12,800
a month in revenue at which time,
with my low 'burn rate' of
a sole proprietor solo founder,
I should be on a nice path of 'organic'
growth and still 100% owner.
Yes, my situation is not 'standard',
but neither are successes in the VC
business.
The VCs need to learn how
to look at and reliably evaluate work
that is new, typically just on paper;
US research academics and high end
US DoD problem sponsors can;
VCs cannot. So far maybe that lapse
has not much hurt them. But, generally,
gotta tell you, the VCs are way, way
behind the leading edge of US
science, technology, and entrepreneurship.