Topic: Venture Capital

User Driven Product Development

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, January 25, 2010 @ 8:02 pm

photo credit: Hugo90

This morning I sat through two pitches by two startups looking for funding. I won't get into the details, but they both had clever ideas at their root. But while one company was attractive and poised for success, the other was mediocre and not getting much traction. Why was that? They both had clever ideas, no?

Over the years I've looked at a lot of business plans for Venture Funds. The first lesson that I learned was that cool ideas didn't equal successful companies. While I would get all hot and bothered by a particularly elegant software solution, the VC's I was consulting to preferred the plans that understood the market and the customers in it (and had a kick ass management team, natch).
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Software Development

Startups, Software and the Vision Thing

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, September 9, 2008 @ 4:44 pm

If you can dream it, you can do it.

-- Walt Disney

You have a great idea, an idea that is going to transform an industry. You've turned a venture capitalist's head with your presentation and now you just need a software development firm to translate your vision into reality. This is where the trouble starts.

If you move in startup VC circles, you see enough of these deals go sideways or never get off the dime. Investors see hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars plowed into software development without a usable product or service coming to light. Fingers are pointed; tears are shed. For every success there are a half dozen failures. Why is that?

In my experience it all comes back to that word, "vision" as in "translate your vision into reality." What the heck is vision? If you've ever cracked a book on software project management (or just general project management), there's usually a section about having a project charter and a vision statement. As a young developer I would wince and turn to the next chapter. After all, I thought, isn't vision the same thing as what you're going to build? Isn't scope or, more basically, a list of things your are going to build, the same thing as "vision?" Why blather on in consultant speak about vision statements when a more concrete and practical project description could be had?

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Software Development