Death of a dream
Posted on October 21st, 2008 by JackI’ve spent the last 9 months building a company. I started out with a basic concept and premise, designed the architecture, researched the market, built a business plan, and started to look for investors. Along the way, I picked up a technology partner, consulted many advisers, and had a number of checkpoint conversations with key people: Am I on the right track? Am I doing the right thing? Is it sellable? Can I really build a business like this?
The current vogue in startups is to follow the agile programming mantra - release early, release often, have your customers partake in the design and debug process. This makes perfect sense in the web world, where data loss, downtime and bugs are de rigueur.
However, a key concept of my product was reliability and resiliency. And it’s hard to ensure those key concepts without a very significant amount of up-front design as well as a significant amount of testing before release. It’s also very hard to convince customers to risk their data on an untested product.
This means I had to decide where to invest my time - building and testing a product with minimal customer input, and funded on my own dime, or try to find investors to fund the R&D effort. I chose the latter.
As I started to have serious discussions with VCs, many of whom were used to dealing with web startups, the topic of prototypes, customers and development stage would come up. While not originally a show stopper, as the financial crisis hit full bore, it became very clear that VCs were not going to fund a concept in the systems space at this point in time.
After some serious soul searching, and a long heart-to-heart discussion with my business partner, we decided it was not the right time to continue to invest in this effort.
Thus, the death of this dream.