"In addition, a big part of the funding discussion is timeline to revenues, which is just completely ignored at this stage in the valley."
I'd be curious to see a long/medium term study on that - I wonder if the discipline of having thought out a "timeline to revenue" might prove to be a net positive to the odds of success.
While everybody can point at Twitter and Facebook as classic examples of "success" (at least in terms of market valuation) without early (or even current) clear plans of how exactly they're planning to make a profit from what they're doing - a "gut feel" suggests that startups with plans that include something like "we've found demographic X of size Y who're prepared to pay $Z/year for a service solving a problem we'll have in place by Q2 next year" are probably more likely to end up profitable that the team who've worked out a cloud-scalable-agile-web2.0-ruby-on-crack method of stealing all the underwear...
-- The valley has Dropbox (a Boston company with an awesome product that moved west)
-- People here cite Carbonite (which apparently makes a lot of $$ and is heading to IPO, but no tech person seems to use it, and they market to the Glenn Beck audience)
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"In addition, a big part of the funding discussion is timeline to revenues, which is just completely ignored at this stage in the valley."
I'd be curious to see a long/medium term study on that - I wonder if the discipline of having thought out a "timeline to revenue" might prove to be a net positive to the odds of success.
While everybody can point at Twitter and Facebook as classic examples of "success" (at least in terms of market valuation) without early (or even current) clear plans of how exactly they're planning to make a profit from what they're doing - a "gut feel" suggests that startups with plans that include something like "we've found demographic X of size Y who're prepared to pay $Z/year for a service solving a problem we'll have in place by Q2 next year" are probably more likely to end up profitable that the team who've worked out a cloud-scalable-agile-web2.0-ruby-on-crack method of stealing all the underwear...
Consider an example of the revenue focus:
-- The valley has Dropbox (a Boston company with an awesome product that moved west)
-- People here cite Carbonite (which apparently makes a lot of $$ and is heading to IPO, but no tech person seems to use it, and they market to the Glenn Beck audience)