EP151. Vitaly Golomb: Accelerating Your Startup!

--> Listen on your Smart Device tonydurso.com/mobile or iTunes. Vitaly Golomb is a venture capitalist, serial entrepreneur keynote speaker and author of Accelerated Startup; a former founding partner at HP Tech Ventures, which is the corporate venture arm of Silicon Valley’s original startup; he's currently Managing Director and Global Head of Principal Investments at IEG Investment Banking Group; he’s a contributing writer to TechCrunch; and he’s a top-ranked mentor at a number of startup accelerator programs.   =Highlights= A great list of accomplishments for Vitaly Golomb at golomb.net. Here’s what made Vitaly get into mentoring startup program. A techie at 13, he started running companies while in college.  Before he went to the “dark side” he had an office in the Ukraine and then began mentoring others, and this is what he noticed. Entrepreneurs around the world had these same issues. These activities in Europe, Asia and China lead him to write his book. You should listen to his TedTalk mentioned here because few have gone through such adversities and come out on top. How do you accelerate a startup? What is a startup? Is every new business a startup? Are you doing something different that no one has done before? Are you doing something that has no roadmap, because it’s completely new? This is precisely where mentoring comes into play.  Are you going out there, into the wilderness without a map? You have to do this to make less mistakes and get closer to your goal. Is the way to accelerate a startup, to throw money at it? You will be surprised to find this out. Here are some of the actions that Vitaly can bring to the table that can truly help a startup become successful. If your business is going the wrong way, this will happen by throwing money at it. Surprising. Did you ever guess that having constrained resources will accomplish this fact? There are plenty of stories of companies being over-funded and having this action happen to them. Milestone or stage-based startups. Is that good? Expanding a startup is like a video game. You have to beat the boss to move up to the next level. Check this out. There are 3 general areas in the startup journey described here. Are you trying to get a product-market-fit?  Are you trying to find the customer for your product which solves a problem for them that they must have? Do you have a product that almost sells itself? The most fun part of the startup journey is the transition. Now that you hit this level, you really graduate and become a company. Do you see the same small company at conferences, year in, year out, and they are doing the same thing on a very slow basis? Vitaly tells why. The goal here is to graduate to the next stage and become a company as fast as possible. Here’s a breakdown on how financing works to grow a company. At this point, now you can raise seed capital. When you have proof of concept, your making money on every customer, you can raise series A. When you really start showing that your scaling and these steps… then you can raise series B. Think of your business like this: it’s a science experiment. What makes a startup special? What is attractive and makes it a win-win for a venture capitalist? There is a limited time for a startup idea to graduate before it becomes enterprises. So there is going to be a race there. When Vitaly listens to a founder and entrepreneur pitch their startup, he asks these two questions.