That’s right, nobody invests in an idea. However they do invest in businesses. Business Plans are ideas and therefore are not very useful for getting investment. However, traction shows that your idea has been developed into a business. Logic would suggest that if you are looking for investment you should spend most of your [...]

This certainly applies to VCs. If you contact them directly or send in a business plan you are wasting your time. They rely on recommendations from attorneys, CPAs and trusted advisers. You have to go through these to get to the VC.

When you start a new business you can fall into one of two categories. You can operate on the premise that you must be right first time or that you will rarely be right fist time, but you use your initial decision as a marker dart for incremental improvement. This is the fundamental paradigm of [...]

At the moment, we are seeing hundreds of thousands of highly skilled workers lose their jobs in different sectors. For instance, 21% of layoffs in Silicon Valley were in the tech sector. Some of which were among the most highly skilled. Today, UBS announced a further cut of 7,500 jobs in the financial sector.

Research from the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland shows that entrepreneurs need not worry about writing an in-dept business plan to get funding from VCs. The research shows that business plans play an insignificant role in the decision making process of Venture Capitalists.

I have put a sample plan for a start-up that is seeking external funding on Scribd.

Karen Gordan Mills is the new US SBA Chief. Mills is a Venture Capitalist and former director of Scotts Miracle-Gro. She was president of MMP Group based in Maine and founder of New York based firm Solera Capital.

Wow! there has been absolutely no Venture Capital backed IPOs in the first quarter of 2009 according to the National Venture Capital Association.