http://bit.ly/fintech
During the wee hours of Friday morning when the rest of the world was asleep I sent out an email to Fred Wilson. I felt ready. I was proud to have a deck that had only three slides. Not only that, the email had no attachment. Instead it was a Google Doc web address, one simple line. T-h-i-s will impress AVC, I thought.
Instead I got put into place. We don't invest in companies pre-incorporation, but I'd be glad to have a Skype conversation with you, he said.
And I am thinking, did I just burn my bridge with Fred Wilson? Did he look at my three slides and think, this has got to be the most green horn aspiring entrepreneur I ever met!
I had asked for 10K pre-incorporation, and 190K post-incorporation.
I politely passed up on the Skype chat idea, something I might have killed for only the day before. I was not going to show off my green hornness some more the same day.
This was not supposed to be a mock pitch. This was supposed to be real. But it ended up being a mock pitch. I was a deer in the headlights.
I immediately sent out the deck to about a half dozen people and promptly redid the whole thing. Now there was one number on there: 200K. I added two images. I got rid of some stuff.
Image by Meetup via CrunchBaseLessons learned. A company needs a name. And it needs to be incorporated.
That same day my other Wharton guy - Fred Wilson went to Wharton - also stepped back a little. He is a first year MBA student, and an energy consultant. We will stay in touch, but for now he is not formally on the team. He is open to coming in into round two, but that is a while away.
I have decided to show up at the MeetUp Headquarters Monday morning to see if Scott Heiferman will lend me 5,000 dollars.
As for the name, I have a few ideas, some others have a few. One name I shot down was MFIville. The only mafia I like are in the movies.
Image by Randy Stewart via Flickr
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