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What type of company does EA prefer to invest in?
"
The philosophies and approaches the founders take toward building companies tend to place their companies in one of seven categories.
1. Quickie
2. Wonderful Wacky MBA
3. Send Money
4. Dreamers
5. One-Stripe Zebra
6. Technoid
7. Guts and Brains (the Dream Team)
All these categories, except Guts and Brains, have one thing in common. They have not done their homework on their business model. They are not ready to raise money. My main mission with these entrepreneurs is to slow them down, strengthen the team, and get them to start asking and answering fundamental questions about their business."
-- Smartups - book by Rob Ryan - Chapter 1, p.g 16.
If you can honestly say "yes" to these questions, then you are someone I want to talk to:
- Does your management team have a couple of strong engineers and one experienced marketing person?
- Does the team have years of experience in the chosen field?
- Are you developing a business hypothesis, and then testing it on potential customers?
- Has the team built a prototype or demo to show to customers?
What type of company will EA not invest in?
Here are some of the symptoms of "Wanna Be" disease:
- Did you form a hastily assembled, lopsided team, with lots of “B” players? Was your attitude that it’s more important to get bodies on the team than to make sure they are the right ones for the job?
- Are you drawn to the business model of the week (for example, consumer.com)?
- Does everyone have significant titles, like CEO, COO, and president?
- Do you find yourself reading analyst reports and getting excited about major market opportunities and trends?
- Did you destroy a forest to create your business plan?
- Do you find yourself asking strangers for money?
- Are you avoiding bootstrapping?
- Are you irritated with the VCs you’re talking to?
- Is your product more like a single function?
If you answered some of the above questions "yes", then you are not what I am interested in.
You think your company is a match, now what?
I am loath to read Business plans because they are in general horrible. There are two good ways to present the Business material. The first is thru a good presentation (see Tips, war stories and tutorials). The second is thru a good executive summary which is 1-2 pages. If you followed the presentation and answered the questions posed in my tutorial then writing the 1-2 pager should be a breeze. Once you have a good presentation or executive summary, please fill out an Online Application, or if you prefer not having to fill out an application you can just send us your executive summary.
After you send your online application, what can you expect? I try to read the submissions in a timely manner. If I am interested I will ask Tim to set up a phone meeting. If you don't hear from me or Tim that is probably due to the fact that I am not interested. If you are uncertain of your status, contact us. Please don't bug Tim it will not help and may hinder.
