bryce roberts - week 12
last week we skyped with bryce roberts of oatv, a seed stage vc investment company. to prep for his talk, we did some research and cramming about the basics of vc and i got a look into a world i had never been interested before. im not necessarily super interested now, but i can say that i learned a lot about how it could affect me and designers like me.
a lot of what bryce talked about was the basics of what his company does and their decision making process - who they fund, why they fund them, when in their evolution they start funding, etc. it’s scary how a wrong step in the vc world can result in pretty major losses for everyone involved (but mostly the people who sought vc funding/the owners of the original idea). that’s why, as bryce said, not everything has to be a start up and not everything has to scale. i think it surprised us all to hear that coming from a vc guy, but i was in total agreement. a true start up is meant to eventually grow into a big scale, international, multi-investor, shared stock sort of dealio. not every idea is meant to live a life like that and not every idea is meant to get tied up in multi million dollar debts to investors. it’s okay to be a weekend warrior and grow your business slowly on your own. after this talk, i know for sure that that’s what i’m gonna do.
ps. that’s not underwear