By Jesse Rodgers
The incubator/accelerator market has a growing number of people watching and waiting for its bubble to pop. The reasons cited for this looming pop should be obvious: most accelerators aren’t going to perform as well as some TechStars programs and not even close to Y Combinator. Poor performance (measured in the number of short-term wins) along with the short-term nature of the funding behind most of the accelerator programs will cause them to run out of money and simply fade into startup history.
But that won’t pop the bubble.
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By Denzil Doyle
In my last article I wrote about the role that a board of directors can play in the success or failure of a company and how to go about recruiting one. In this article, I will give an example of a board model that shareholders could feel good about and one that had danger signals written all over it right from the beginning.
A rough ride for RIM
I will start with the one with the danger signals. About four years ago, when Research in Motion was flying high, I attended a talk by a seasoned CEO who was very critical of many aspects of corporate governance at RIM, but particularly about the existence of two CEOs. It was the strong consensus of the meeting (which took the form of a panel discussion) that a dual-CEO system does not work and that the RIM board was negligent in allowing it to happen there.
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By Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Version One Ventures, Ventureburn, MarketingProfs, Techvibes and SmartBlog on Social Media.
Does your product pass the toothbrush test?
Are the products you are building important enough that people will use them at least twice a day? Boris Wertz of Version One Ventures uses the toothbrush as a metaphor for user engagement. He states that “High repeat usage = large potential business.”
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By David French
In our previous posting, we addressed the issue of getting to the point in drafting a patent application. I suggested that inventors would be well-served if they did make the attempt to draft their own patent disclosure document. I strongly recommended against proceeding without the support of a patent professional. But at the same time, I emphasized the advantages of understanding the patenting process by trying to do part of the work yourself.
The challenge in patenting is to identify a feature that is different from what has been done before and to focus a patent disclosure document on that feature. This requires understanding what is patentable and exercising the discipline to stay focused. Too many inventors trying to write their own patent applications think that the more words they use, the better. They respond to the impulse to show off how much they know. They think that longer makes a patent disclosure document better. This could not be further from the truth.
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The problem isn’t too little smart money, it’s too many dumb deals
By Ronald Weissman
The meme of the month is “The Series A Crunch.” According to Crunch Theory, many worthy seed-funded startups lack follow-on capital because VCs now have smaller funds or have moved later stage. CB Insights estimates $1 billion in seed financing will be “incinerated” and at least 1,000 companies will be orphaned. Other data suggest that the number of orphans could be much larger.
Those who say the problem lies with VCs (CB Insights isn’t one of them) must argue that the number of Series A deals has fallen sharply. This is not true and the problem lies elsewhere. Whatever the cause, there is, certainly, a capital crunch for seed-funded startups and it is likely to get worse, as the backlog of seed-stage companies needing Series A funding continues to grow.
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