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I was talking to an acquaintance who recently joined the entrepreneurs club less than a year ago after quitting his job and started a one man bootstrapped startup which is now growing nicely with a small team and a growing list of customers. He said “When I just got started with this I didn’t really need a lot of funding or a large team but I do wish I had a large advisory board of experts I could go to just to confirm I was making the right decisions along the way.” He added most recently, he was evaluating a few different funding offers which were on the table each with its own terms on the role, equity, time frame and expectations each investor had. The dilemma was which would be the best investor to partner with for him? There’s a lot to think about while making a decision as big as this one. A lot of questions to ask…is this going to be a first round of funding? Are you alright with the amount of equity you will offer for the funding? Will there be future rounds of funding required? How will that impact your stake and how much will it be diluted in future? And this is just one decision!

One of the perks of being a member of a venture community like our GrowVC network is you have a virtual advisory board you can turn to for advice on just about anything you would like a second, third, fourth or fifth opinion on. Aside from the funding platform, the investment marketplace and the other known features of the network, one of the most important visions of ours is to create a nurturing environment where all those with experience can pool together that experience and knowledge to support newer generations of entrepreneurs. Every startup CEO (Investors and others too)who has been on the journey for more than a certain number of years would know there is joy in being able to mentor and guide new startups setting out on the same journey you took before. With so many highly experienced people from across a range of fields, there is one giant advisory board at every member’s disposable who are happy to help advise you on queries from small doubts to complex situations.

While entrepreneurs individually could appear caught up in their own work or engrossed in their own ventures, as a community, they are different. From observation I’ve seen most successful and entrepreneurs who have been around a long time have a strong will to help others within the entrepreneurial community in whatever way they can as a way to give back to the ecosystem that they stemmed from. A will to encourage others to follow their vision and ideas and a joy in being able to help them with whatever they have learned and can share. So why would someone give you advice and help? Because they care! They have been on a similar journey and can relate with you.

The best part is, you need not wait the years till you are a large business with the resources to hire and put together groups of experts or an advisory board. You could be a single person startup and still get direction and help from those that have been on large advisory boards simply because they are glad to help. Whether you choose to connect with someone personally through the network or use the talks section to post your queries, you’ll find the support you need.

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Tags: advisor, startup, support

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Business Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.