trendpreneur

I found this post by Matt Mireles thought-provoking, although people appear to be disagreeing with a laundry-list of the flaws of Silicon Valley and the very idea that you need VC in the first place.

You don’t, of course. But you do need mentors, advisers, encouragement, and dreams.

Here’s the key:

One of the dangers that first time founders living outside of the Valley (like me) face is that our minds get poisoned and our ambitions shrunk by the parochial leaders. And it’s not even that all the locals are small-minded or small timers, but that the ones who really push you to think big––the Chris Dixons & the Fred Wilsons––are so far removed from and inaccessible to the little guys that by the time you get a meeting with them, your thinking and your pitch has already been influenced and shaped by the more numerous and accessible VCs that push you to think smaller and safer.

I can’t even begin to think of the iterations my pitch and concept has gone through that exactly follow this pattern. My initial thinking was big – huge. Vague, but huge. After over a year of work and pitch training, during which I settled on a specific v1 product and market, got advice and feedback from local experts, etc, I went to London.

My idea/pitch got good feedback for its specificity and level of well-thought-out-ness, but the questions were all about the bigger idea behind it. Why hadn’t I started with that? Why did I dive into a product that hadn’t been built yet, and enumerate its opportunity, not the way I was going to change the world? Because that’s the advice I’d been given, in Scotland.

And a while later, after more refinement, etc, I went to Silicon Valley. Wow. To even get near the big guys, you have to have something big. You have to be changing the world. I didn’t want to be one of those hugely inflationary “I’m doing a startup! Look at me! Isn’t running a startup with millions of other’s people’s dollars” venture-backed businesses, but there’s the rub; if you don’t think on that level, you just don’t get the attention — or advice — you came here for.

[Via Hacker News]