by Sandra
21. July 2009 14:53
I attended a Bay Area business session last week on funding models for cash-starved times. It was a great lineup of speakers including both partners from largest silicon valley VC firms and startup founders from fotki and friendster, very energetic crowd. 2 takeaways to share:
- investors these days are looking to fund startups that has the creativity/potential to go to market faster and cheaper.
- there's never been a better time to launch a startup, boot strap - there's never been more leverage and resources available: opensource technology, SaaS offerings, and quality development partners with cost advantage (like Relaystrategy, for example
).
Right now, around 75% of our businesses are from startups and small businesses. We can feel the significant increase in entrepreneurs that are doing something about their ideas. A lot of exciting and innovative web development ideas around social networks, SaaS products, platform driven web apps (such as twitter and facebook), and online tools - almost everything under development is using opensource resources. I could not agree more with the general sentiment from the bizsession.
As a technology services company, our team have thoroughly appreciated and enjoyed the collaboration with these startups/small businesses - because of them, our business model is also becoming leaner, more efficient, and a whole lot more creative.