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Linkedin: Who’s Scared Of Facebook?

Following on from my reports on Bebo and MySpace, I look into why Linkedin is the only true social networking site that isn’t scared of Facebook…. Facebook is the titan of the social networking world. With over 570 million users, it dwarfs all of the other social networks, chewing up and spitting out any network [...]

Invest In The Chef Not The Recipe

I recently heard a successful serial entrepreneur and early stage investor state that the secret to early stage investing is to invest in ‘the chef not the recipe’. One of Silicon Valley’s greatest early stage investors, Bill Draper, used to tell me that he treated the entrepreneurs that he invested in like a stable of [...]

25/02/2010
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funding

‘Money Hides’ – Investors Too!

I was recently told of a Spanish saying which states that ‘money hides’. Never has this been more real. Last week we wrote an article on  ‘Banks Battle Entrepreneurs’ which got a flurry of entrepreneurs contacting me with their particular war stories. Shocking. The reality is things are even worse than I thought. You see, [...]

Funding Boost for High Tech Businesses

Getting enough funds to start a new business sometimes feels as likely as winning the lottery! But there is a silver lining – at least in the UK. Hi-tech startups can apply for the all new UK Innovation Investment Fund. Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that life sciences, plus digital and advanced manufacturing businesses are at [...]

When to Raise Money for Startups

We recently wrote a lengthy article on how to raise money for startups. The process of fundraising. But what about the when? 11 years ago I launched an incubator so we set about defining and developing a process for building a venture. We figured that it was hard enough building one business at a time – [...]

How to Raise Money for Startups

I’ve been reading a bunch of interesting articles on how investment dollars are flowing back to startups and on how to raise money. It got me thinking. I can remember when I was running my second startup, called CMI, which was a digital publishing company when digital meant floppy discs. We needed to raise money [...]