The evasive funding

One of the things that has often been mentioned as setting the US and Europe apart in terms of entrepreneurship was the access to money. To funding. The ability for founders to find people willing to invest in their idea.

It was conceived as being much easier in the US, whereas a lot of Europeans had a somewhat more conservative approach to funding. In Europe VC’s would only come on board once you had a proven business model, real revenue - and perhaps even profits. In the US there was less of an adversity towards taking risk.

It seems like this is changing. Sramana Mitra writes that VC’s are collecting bigger and bigger funds which they use to enter a company at a much later stage than before. The result is that if you’re a new-comer to the world of funding, getting money on board is getting tougher.

The way I see it the relative easy access to money has always been the one thing that really made it possible (compared to a sizeable market for almost anything) to launch something succesfully in the US. Why would they want to kill that?

Don’t get me wrong. Investors should always be really critical about how and why they choose to invest. But deciding to turn their backs on new comers in general just doesn’t seem to be the answer.