chapter five
5 Friends and family, angels, venture capital, or strategic?
- What are the prime funding sources for your brand spanking new startup?
- When attempting to raise from friends and family will it be smooth sailing or choppy waters?
- Do you know when it makes sense to call on angel investors?
- Strategic investors can be a good source or not. Are you clear on the ups and downs of them?
On a major Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program called CRASH, I co-led a large program where we invented technology that blocked virtually all cyberattacks. Then, in 2015, after four and a half years of research, I took two of the most central people behind it with me to a laboratory where we could “incubate” these ideas into a brand-new startup.
definition
Incubation is about creating a safe space in which all the work necessary to create a new company can be done in a careful way before the company has to face the real world of customers and investors. Safe in this context mostly has to do with money.