Yesterday I’ve come over very interesting speech by Beth Seidenberg – Partner at Kleiner Perkins venture capital company. She gave some very interesting criteria for startup company to be succesfully selected during VC filtering.

So here is Beth’s “5 key factors”:

1. A+ leadership. Passionate founders.

This  she calls “most important thing”. Your startup should have A+ class leader, passionate about the product and its users.

2. Large, fast-growing, under-served markets.

VCs do not usually look for small, emerging markets (no matter how big potential these markets have) but for large, well developed, mature markets with clearly defined demand for the service or product. And this demand has to be bigger than current supply.

3.  Reasonable financings.

Well, you’d better not negotiate too much with Kleiner Perkins, but rather accept their proposal – there will probably be no second chance ). As Beth says, the value of your company should be equal to the value of products you already have.

4. Sense of urgency.

This requirement also absolutely makes sense. If you’re slow, you’re not the first out there, if you’re not the first, this may lead you to defeat.

5. Missionaries, not mercenaries.

As Beth says, it is much more important to think about product and value it brings to customer than to focus on thinking about big revenues, quick ROI and profit margins.

Author: Sergii Gorpynich

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Web 2.0 business.
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