britcpa, Thanks for that post. In your experience, when a big idea isn't accepted by VC's as worthwhile, which I'd imagine most aren't - is the reasoning ALWAYS it just wasn't good enough? Meaning, if you had 300 people come in with their ideas. Ultimately only 10 of them were funded and backed, did 100% of the other 290 just not have it? Could you say some of them had the idea, but the way they projected it wasn't good enough and because of that, their concept, while good, wasn't fully grasped?
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Good ideas stand out like diamonds in a coal mine and what separated the winners from the losers were THE MANAGEMENT TEAM who would be charged with implementation of the concept.
Invariably, a good idea which stood out but wouldnt receive funding was due to not having a solid business team behind it - i.e. if most of the drive and delivery was down to one man/two men, the investors would feel they were at risk and move on. Hey! Why not? There's no shortage of people with ideas looking for people with money. Some of the management structures in place will give an investor more confidence for them to go to the next stage - due diligence.
If you truly have a classy idea and it requires outside funding, my advice would be that you need to present yourself to would be suitors as a TEAM rather than as just you.
If its just you, the investors will look at how much hand holding they'll have to do to keep the project sweet and self-sustaining even if youre fully committed to its success, but what if theyre faced with a worst case scenario and you're ill, or lose interest and get excited by something else, or get depressed and wont get out of bed, or are full of joi de vivre and go on a bender with some lapdancing chums, etc etc.
IF you have a team behind you, all of a sudden youre presenting a BUSINESS IDEA to investors rather than AN IDEA.
Michael Gerber wrote THE E-MYTH & depending where you are in your life and with your business, you may well find that it answers a lot of questions this thread of yours has raised.
All the best from London.
ps - in all of MY experience, i never saw vc's put money into JUST an idea. They always wanted to see something up and running even if embryonic, but more often than not, something that was actually working and had ironed out many of the kinks or had identified them all but didnt have the finanical resources to resolve them.
pps - what a vc didnt like, was a nasty surprise and especially the kind of nasty surprise that meant you'd underestimated the investment required of them - i.e you have their cash and some time later, go back asking for more.
Make sure that you know your numbers back to front and blindfolded because that will give them confidence in you and your knowledge of your own business and by definition, that makes you worth listening to a little bit more than the next bloke theyre seeing.
Never never never be in a position where youre asking for more money without that always being part of the original plan.
