Awake? Moi?
Aug. 19th, 2004 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupI've actually been up since noon. Yesterday was a fairly full day for me, and I didn't get home until late, so I didn't say much then. Here's a quick recap of the events of yesterday:
Got up at 9:00 am to wake up and do some simple prep-work for a 1:00 pm meeting with the entrepreneur who's hired me. The prep work was pretty much just making a list of issues and questions I wanted to discuss with him. It turned out to be a good idea, because it took some 2 hours of the meeting to work through the list.
Anyway, I did some surfing, grabbed a quick breakfast of hard-boiled eggs and cheese, and was out the door at 11:45.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
taxlady drove me to the pointe-clair village where I caught a bus at 12:15, and was at the meeting place (Tim Hortons) for 12:55, slightly early even. I had just gotten in line to buy some coffee when K, the entrepreneur showed up, and said he had raced there and had yet to have breakfast, so could we go somewhere else to eat, his treat.
As my breakfast had been 4 hours earlier, and small, I readily agreed, and we walked to a local greasy spoon called Moe's. We spent the next 4 hours discussing the nitty-gritty of investors, financing, organization, personnelle and money needs, and so on.
Just as last time, I came away with that Good News / Bad News feeling.
The Good News is that after getting a number of details out of K regarding the company, the investors, and whatnot, it now DOES fit into my mental image of how you go about getting money from an investor. That's good. It makes it all that much more likely that its for real. I've also done a bit of googling for the investors, now I know who they are, and it turns out that they are based here in Montreal and that they have an international reputation for spending money on research and development for cutting-edge avionics technology. Since K is looking to produce (as User Info_sps_ would put it) spurting-red-all-over-the-edge technology, we're definitely in their baliwick. K is also more and more convincing as someone who has a clear idea of what they want and how to go about getting it.
Now the bad news. Its looking to me that the 2-week estimate that K gave me about money availability is awfully optimistic. As far as I can tell, what K has been doing for the last 6 months has been going through all the screening and interviews to see if the investors think his ideas have market potential. He's now reached the point where the investors have said something along the lines of "Great, find a team and a location for the company, and write us up a business plan, and we'll see about getting you some money. It should be a fast turnaround." Depending on the internal organization of the investors, this can take any one of several paths. A normal Venture Capital firm would already have dismissed us, so I'll ignore that option. A typical Angel Investor would have a process like:
This can easily take 3 months to a year from the time at which we hand in the business plan (In case of government agencies, it could well be 2-3 years).
An Incubator-style Angel Investor (which is what I'm hoping we have) would work more like this:
The second method is a more expedited method, and gets us enough cash to proceed almost immediately upon handing over the business plan. There are also a dozen variations that fall in between. So, it looks to me like 3 months is a more likely estimate of when things might really start happening.
Anyway, another bit of good news is that K is willing to start acruing my pay from last Friday, since I've offerred to help him through this whole mess of setting up the company, and he can afford to pay me a monthly stippend while things drag on. The stippend won't keep me out of the poor house, but it will help delay things, and may well buy enough time to get the actual money.
Anyway, after the meeting, and a quick bit to eat, I headed off to thenancyrihakova and the
denizsarikaya's residence (AKA 'Diva's House of Pain'), for a game of Settlers of Catan with them and
_sps_. It was a long and surprisingly hard-fought game.
(Althoughdenizsarikaya's work commitments prevented her from showing up early enough to join in), and I most enjoyed it. I haven't seen enough of some of my friends lately. I'm hoping that this might change soon.
taxlady came to pick me and
_sps_ up and after dropping him at his place, we headed home. We got in around 2:00 am, and I spent an hour catching up on LJ and email, and then I went to bed.
(Forgive the strange formatting above -- I'm working around a bug in my LJ client.)
Got up at 9:00 am to wake up and do some simple prep-work for a 1:00 pm meeting with the entrepreneur who's hired me. The prep work was pretty much just making a list of issues and questions I wanted to discuss with him. It turned out to be a good idea, because it took some 2 hours of the meeting to work through the list.
Anyway, I did some surfing, grabbed a quick breakfast of hard-boiled eggs and cheese, and was out the door at 11:45.
taxlady drove me to the pointe-clair village where I caught a bus at 12:15, and was at the meeting place (Tim Hortons) for 12:55, slightly early even. I had just gotten in line to buy some coffee when K, the entrepreneur showed up, and said he had raced there and had yet to have breakfast, so could we go somewhere else to eat, his treat.As my breakfast had been 4 hours earlier, and small, I readily agreed, and we walked to a local greasy spoon called Moe's. We spent the next 4 hours discussing the nitty-gritty of investors, financing, organization, personnelle and money needs, and so on.
Just as last time, I came away with that Good News / Bad News feeling.
The Good News is that after getting a number of details out of K regarding the company, the investors, and whatnot, it now DOES fit into my mental image of how you go about getting money from an investor. That's good. It makes it all that much more likely that its for real. I've also done a bit of googling for the investors, now I know who they are, and it turns out that they are based here in Montreal and that they have an international reputation for spending money on research and development for cutting-edge avionics technology. Since K is looking to produce (as User Info_sps_ would put it) spurting-red-all-over-the-edge technology, we're definitely in their baliwick. K is also more and more convincing as someone who has a clear idea of what they want and how to go about getting it.
Now the bad news. Its looking to me that the 2-week estimate that K gave me about money availability is awfully optimistic. As far as I can tell, what K has been doing for the last 6 months has been going through all the screening and interviews to see if the investors think his ideas have market potential. He's now reached the point where the investors have said something along the lines of "Great, find a team and a location for the company, and write us up a business plan, and we'll see about getting you some money. It should be a fast turnaround." Depending on the internal organization of the investors, this can take any one of several paths. A normal Venture Capital firm would already have dismissed us, so I'll ignore that option. A typical Angel Investor would have a process like:
- Read the business plan, ask for clarifican and rework several times
- Forward the business plan to a comittee, which meets (probably only once every few months) to discuss new plans.
- If it passes the comitted, perform Due Dilligence which involves interviews with the various team members, and possibly market analysis of the business plan.
- If it passes due dilligence Send us a copy of their standard (unacceptable) investment contract
- Negotiate the contract so that it's a lot more fair to us.
- Incoporate the company, based on the contract agreement.
- Get a first outlay of cash from the investors.
- Rent the property, formally hire the team members, start work.
This can easily take 3 months to a year from the time at which we hand in the business plan (In case of government agencies, it could well be 2-3 years).
An Incubator-style Angel Investor (which is what I'm hoping we have) would work more like this:
- Read the business plan, possibly ask for a rewrite.
- Present us with a short-term consulting contract asking us to do various bits of proposal writing and so on.
- Upon signing the contract, we get some small amount of money to fund the work.
- Upon handing in the detailed analysis, they go out for board approval.
- Upon approval, we negotiate a contract, and incorporate
- We're now in business.
The second method is a more expedited method, and gets us enough cash to proceed almost immediately upon handing over the business plan. There are also a dozen variations that fall in between. So, it looks to me like 3 months is a more likely estimate of when things might really start happening.
Anyway, another bit of good news is that K is willing to start acruing my pay from last Friday, since I've offerred to help him through this whole mess of setting up the company, and he can afford to pay me a monthly stippend while things drag on. The stippend won't keep me out of the poor house, but it will help delay things, and may well buy enough time to get the actual money.
Anyway, after the meeting, and a quick bit to eat, I headed off to the
nancyrihakova and thedenizsarikaya's residence (AKA 'Diva's House of Pain'), for a game of Settlers of Catan with them and_sps_. It was a long and surprisingly hard-fought game.(Although
denizsarikaya's work commitments prevented her from showing up early enough to join in), and I most enjoyed it. I haven't seen enough of some of my friends lately. I'm hoping that this might change soon.taxlady came to pick me and_sps_ up and after dropping him at his place, we headed home. We got in around 2:00 am, and I spent an hour catching up on LJ and email, and then I went to bed.(Forgive the strange formatting above -- I'm working around a bug in my LJ client.)
