149th 1M/1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Democratization Of Startup Financing
By Guest Post at November 16, 2012 | 9:58 am | Print
149th 1M/1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Democratization Of Startup Financing
Before I get into today’s roundtable, I want to point you to a discussion on Democratization of Startup Financing that I suggest you read, given your interest in early stage startups. Here’s an excerpt:
In anticipation of the JOBS Act, the democratization of the startup and small business financing industry is heating up. I wrote about CrowdFunding: Trends and Opportunities recently. Most of this is still a hypothesis. Investors have not started writing debt or equity checks to random strangers online yet. They may, they may not. We shall see. Donations, however, are happening. But donations won’t get us to a significant momentum in startup funding. Read: Democratization of Startup Financing: What’s in Store
During this week’s roundtable, we worked with two entrepreneurs, one of whom is a 1M/1M premium member.
CliniTrial
First, Avik Pal from Fremont, California, pitched CliniTrial, a concept-stage venture that aims to address the inefficiencies in the clinical trial process. While major chunks of the process (drug discovery, regulatory) are lengthy, and by and large, unchangeable, the actual process of managing the trials can be shortened by a lot. That is where CliniTrial wants to make its mark.
Today, we discussed segmentation, market validation strategy, and chalked out a game plan for the immediate next phase for the company.
Next, Devendra Singh from Ghaziabad, India, pitched RetailBiz, an online education concept for training various aspects of managing an electronic commerce business, from logistics, to merchandising, to technology.
Devendra is currently struggling with the usual chicken and egg problem of how to handle the issue of not having money to hire experts to develop curriculum material. I suggested that he reads a case study on my blog that describes the wonderful entrepreneurial journey of Plural Sight.
Utah entrepreneur Aaron Skonnard has bootstrapped the company to $12 million in revenue, using a royalty-based revenue sharing model with content producers who have specific expertise and desire to produce curriculum material. While the domain is different, the model is highly replicable.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here.
By
She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy, and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka, and Uuma. Sramana has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
