I came across the following Wall Street Journal article today that I claim further proves my point that an entrepreneur’s ideas will be more disliked than admired in the early days.
Apparently, at the moment, venture capitalists are shunning Internet startup ideas that do not base their revenue models on advertising.
“If you have a model that is different from the 90% of consumer-Web companies folks are seeing today … it’s difficult to break through that clutter,” says Cake CEO Steven A. Carpenter…
My claim – this is not a new trend. Very few venture capital partners can identify a new, game changing opportunity and such fund “me-too” ideas instead of much riskier ones. (This doesn’t mean they won’t be successful. Partners like Tim Draper have been following the same paradigm for a decade… Give things away for free, hype them to death and sell, sell, sell. Worked for Hotmail & Skype, making Tim very rich.)
Nonetheless, no one thought Skype was a good idea until eBay bought it… Now if only someone could explain that to me…
Finding Nilay 