It seems I’ve inadvertantly touched a nerve. My intention was to refute your claim that “that the brightest visionary people in Australia, will continue to leave its shores & travel overseas” and the implication that “investors” are responsible for and would have to accept that fact.

In any case, the first part of your response was an assumption, the second part an insult and the third part is a question only you can answer.

I’m done here, moving on.

i think investors need to understand that as an inventor, i am HIGHLY intelligent… otherwise i wouldnt have been able to solve the engineering challenges required to conceptualise solutions to real world problems (nor to figure out the details)… so why the hell would i agree to their crappy offers? especially when they are asking me to do all the hard work on my own, with no funding, taking all the risks to get the project to the point where there is almost no risk left before they will come in & take the lions share… thats just plain stupid.

i understand that they want to make up for the investments they have made in the past where they lost money… but NONE of that has anything whatsoever to do with me, so i will not take one bit of responsibility for it. i already had to take the MASSIVE risk of throwing my entire LIFE into this over the last decade and a half, and there isnt any amount of money they could ever invest to make up for that, so i fail to see why they should get anything other than a share which is proportional to their investment over the potential gains of the business… and the fact is, that even what i WOULD agree to, would potentially still earn them WAY more than they would get at a bank or almost any other alternative investment, so its just up to them whether or not they want to take the risk.

So they are going to have to start doing their own job better, rather than effectively blaming inventors for the mistakes they made themselves on someone else’s business. they are going to have to start making more reasonable offers… OR they are going to have to accept, that the brightest visionary people in Australia, will continue to leave its shores & travel overseas… because there is no way in hell i will agree to any of the terms i have ever seens so far, they are quite simply NOT reasonable.

There is certainly a merry dance being done between investors and investees and I find this to be both amusing and ridiculous at the same time. Many of the Angels I know have taken several almost fatal hits in the past 18 months and so I think they maybe a little more entitled to be wary.

On the other hand, they seem to think that by asking the same tried and tested questions they are somehow eliminating or managing their risk. Again, sadly we all know this is not the case.

Unfortunately as Trevor seems to be experiencing, all the investors are thinking right now is “how do I make up what I lost last year” and “this guy must be desperate and should be grateful for my money”.

Perhaps we should introduce some good old fashioned Victorian fathering principles? Make sure the two parties court each other over a couple of months, chaperone them to the dance, make sure they’re home by midnight and never let them get into bed together until they’re married?

This way they might form a marital bond before they try to have all the fun?

Simon

where should i write to you at? can you send me instructions of how to submit it to you directly to my gmail?

i didnt need to hear YET AGAIN what the investor wants… i am well aware of it

can any investors out there claim they know what i want?

…of course not, because they dont care…

and hence, the very reason why Australia is not living up to its potential.

All but the very naïve entrepreneurs know they need to present VCs with very explicit details of the Market, Personnel, Required Capital, Customer Demand and Experienced Management.

However, the real 5 messages they are receiving are ;

1. Show us you are far enough down the track to have “predictable results”.
(Are new ventures about risk or certainty ? )

2. Show us you have “an already proven, great management team, with deep
experience in the market, who have demonstrated past successes and can
rapidly build a business that is large enough to produce a big pay-off”
(but … be ready to take our experts on board at considerable cost, to
bring those proven people up to speed)

3. Do not expect us to make any real connection to your product or service
(even though we are promising to provide great business input) as we are
purely interested in dollars.

4. Show us how your venture can produce a return of 10x to 15x within 3 to 5
years and be readily IPO’d or sold at a great profit, because history has
shown we select so few winners (despite our ‘expertise’) that we need to
make huge profits from the few selections that do succeed.

5. Be prepared to lose a large chunk of what you own, for gaining what amounts
to financing. (as you already have in place what is needed for success if
you have met our first 4 requirements)

Maybe there needs to be some rethinking of the 5 “musts” ?

Peter Clutton