./emilychang eBot

I seem to spend a lot of time convincing people not to raise money. The #1 culprit is not The Downturn or a lack of good ideas. The real problem is that people are trying to raise money too early when things are still half-baked. Here is my top 10 list of tough questions all entrepreneurs should ask themselves before trying to raise money.

"Too much money is worse than too little for most organization-not that I wouldn’t like to run a Super Bowl commercial someday. Until that day comes, the key to success for most organizations is bootstrapping. The term bootstrapping comes from the German legend of Baron von Munchhausen pulling himself out of the sea by pulling on his own bootstraps. That’s essentially what you’ll have to do, too.”

SGN founder Shervin Pishevar, jetlagged and sleep deprived on a “secret mision” trip to Eastern Europe, wrote a long and partially lucid email to friends last night. I reprint it here because it captures much of the entrepreneurial spirit that drives so many of the men and women who we write about. 

The iPhone is a revolutionary handset. But it is also the key to a virtual gold mine—the iTunes App Store, where independent developers can become multimillionaires in just a year.

Twitter is “a sophisticated, device-agnostic, social message routing system that nobody realizes they need until they try it,” Stone says.

"Eleven days ago, 23-year-old Justin Kan was just another no-name startup guy with big dreams of the small screen. Then he and his friends launched Justin.tv, an Internet reality show chronicling their adventures as young San Francisco entrepreneurs that, at least for now, is proving to be a smash hit with online viewers.”

"We’ve now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded.”