Why do we even need to have this conversation?

Ty for sharing!

They always do.

2 times as the "bright engineer to explain things" for a couple of "promising young startup" companies, and 1 time for the startup I founded... I can tell you one thing.

You must have compelling patents to get money from the fund managers at the VC firms.

Hopefully you have more than one.

Applying for and getting a patent, especially in software, cost my company around $25K per patent in 2001. The broader the patent the most it costs. This is your IP. This is what gets you funded.

These idiots have forgotten this... or they think that now that they are worth billions, close the gate behind them to keep new "tech bros" from getting funding for their ideas.

Watch the comedy HBO show "Silicon Valley" ( the first two seasons as Richard has his brilliant idea and gets it patented and fights with patent trolls and VCs, etc ). It is a comedy... but I swear it is accurate, painfully so.

Interesting background in tech. I hope your startup was very successful.

Think I'll post a link here for those who don't get the Sand Hill Road reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hill_Road

I heard good things about that series, haven't watched it, but will. It's on MAX now.

and I think of the VC bros every time I drive it.

my startup did, but not from Sand Hill road VCs. This was in 2001. Dot Com bust.

I tell a story that you could have put a magic machine on the table in front of the VC guys that you put a stack of 100 dollar bills in one side, and flip a switch and you get out bundles of legit legal 100 dollar bills out the other side and all you ask is $10 million to fund it and they would have turned you down.

I literally walked into one meeting after the partners had just "scrubbed" a 100 million dollar fund ( every venture they gave money to was bankrupt now ). You have never seen so many frowning faces. I was proposing a new application for the internet for small to medium businesses... automatic constant incremental backup over the internet. My patents were in the field of what is now called de-duplication ( a term I hate for what I invented ). The internet was still "slow" 25 years ago, so doing any backups over the internet was difficult without my technology. However, 9/11 made everyone aware that backups off prem were absolutely required... and tape backups done nightly were no longer "good enough". Business continuity was essential. I had a way to do constant incremental backups and "de-dupe" the change data before sending it to my backup as a service ( BAAS ) at colo places around the country. Again, this was 20 to 25 years ago now. Standard practice today.

I spent a year as an EIR for Siemens looking at other business plans... and they eventually hooked me up with some crazy Australian investors.

I inked a deal with another startup called "Cobalt" who make Linux servers with a point and click admin interface... everyone was buying these 1U servers and sticking them into public server farms ( colos ) and putting their web based companies on them... Cobalt was going to include my BAAS software as a standard option and do the sales for me. Web company buys a cobalt, rents space and bandwidth... signs up for a monthly fee for my BAAS... no problem. But then Cobalt was purchased by Sun Microsystems ( a major supplier of workstations and web servers in the day ) and Sun decided to cancel the contract. Sigh.



Long story short, the Aussies never came up with the money to go into production... we noodled along and eventually sold the company to a larger tech backup company for some decent money... but not the 100s of millions that I think it might have been worth.

oh well. My investors and I made some money.

advances you came up with. There's way too much irrationality in the way venture capitalists invest.