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Zoli Erdos – Entrepreneurship and early-stage funding

I recently came across Zoli Erdos through Dennis Howlett’s blog. Zoli writes extensively about entrepreneurship and early-stage funding. Couple of interesting articles I found from his site include:

  • Why Startups Shouldn’t Bother About NDA’s – This article took me to Dharmesh Shah‘s blog. Another guy who has done it and can proudly wear the T-shirt. Just dropped an introductory e-mail to Dharmesh. Need to identify synergies between the two businesses. With regards to NDAs, I still demand signing a NDA before going into lengthy discussion about ebdex. However, this does not always work with VCs, as they generally refuse signing such documents, let alone NDAs. I also know a friend, who is very protective of her idea and would not even reveal to me, after discussing many aspects of start-ups for well over a year. Also in the same article, Zoli states a very valid point “I mostly work with software startups, and I think it’s safe enough to claim that in this field concepts do not get funded. You need a prototype – partial functionality, alpha, demo (not slides!) ..etc, and some form of market / customer validation. Anything less is just fluff.” I fully agree with him given the first hand experience now I have.
  • Blogging Essential for your Career – Not sure whether I fully agree, as blogging is time consuming. So you need to understand what ROI do you expect. So far, my experiences have been positive. I need to turn these positive experiences to commercial success. One might be with David Terrar. Time will tell.
  • Enterprise SaaS Startups from an Investor’s Point of View – “It takes 70% to 100% more capital to fund a SaaS company to break-even than a traditional perpetual license company. It also takes 2 to 3 times longer to get there.” I am not sure that I agree with this statement. I assume the speaker has real experience to come up with these figures. Our business model is radically different. Cannot comment too much here without that all important NDA!! According to Zoli, “only SaaS gets funded today”. I wish I am based in Silicon Valley!
  • Software 2006: Questioning the McKinsey Study – “Two major business models are vying for a growing share of software spend: Software as a Service and Open Source. …SaaS has already gained traction in number of application areas – such as payroll, human capital management, CRM, conferencing, procurement, logistics, information services, and e-commerce) – and should make gains across a much broader cross-section of applications over the next 3 years. Out of 34 application areas we have examined, only nine are unlikely to see some SaaS adoption over through 2008”. McKinsey identifies “document and records management” as an area that is unlike to be offered as a SaaS. This is the closest area ebdex comes into, and our offer is SaaS and we are in EIPP market.

I now have a RSS feed from Zoli’s blog. Hope you enjoyed above – this proves that if you do not have anything worth saying, talk about somebody else’s blog. Perhaps I will write about business plans tomorrow, as I just finished updating ours! Good night!

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