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Archive for the ‘update’ Category

Grow VC has no commission and costs per investment are less than 0.5%
Monday, August 9th, 2010
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Our model has several components and we have noticed that there have been misunderstandings about our commission. Of the membership fee, we keep 25% to run our operations – but it doesn’t mean we have 25% commission. It would be a skyrocket high commission, no way.

Instead of keeping whole membership fee as our revenue, we use 75% of the membership fees for community fund investments, so it goes to startups, and community members decide, how it is invested. We then reward members for these selections, if the investments are good. When a member has paid the fee, the one with funder role (investors) can then make direct investment without any commission and entrepreneurs can raise money to their startup without any commission. To clarify; there are no traditional commission, only the membership fee.
We made some calculations to see an effective cost per investment level by using the 25% of the membership fee as a fixed fee. You can see the results in the table below. The first three cases are for monthly membership, i.e. if an investor or entrepreneur make or get the full investment in a month, the last two cases for a year.

Fee

Investment cap

To Community fund

Effective fee

Effective cost per investment

Remarks

$ 110.00

$ 500,000

$ 82.50

$ 27.50

0.01%

for montly investments

$ 30.00

$ 50,000

$ 22.50

$ 7.50

0.01%

for montly investments

$ 20.00

$ 25,000

$ 15.00

$ 5.00

0.02%

for montly investments

$ 950.00

$ 50,000

$ 712.50

$ 237.50

0.47%

for annual investments

$ 400.00

$ 100,000

$ 300.00

$ 100.00

0.10%

for annual investments

As you can see, the effective costs are always less than 0.5%. Of course, if an investor or entrepreneur doesn’t use the full amount, the effective cost is higher. But that’s why we have those steps that everyone can find her or his right level and pay an optimal membership fee.

Grow VC is really a costs effective model to make and look for investments. We also work to find standard models for investment agreements, due diligence and other needed services, to keep those costs down too. The Grow VC model is cost effective compared to any investment service, but especially the costs structure is totally different from the traditional VC model. Our aim is really to create an effective market for startup funding. Startups and investors need it.

Update: You can also read the related blog post about our model in full detail and listen for related audio below.

 
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Podcast: Local Platforms for a Global Vision
Friday, July 30th, 2010
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We have just launched Grow VC India and we thought it would be appropriate to elaborate on our vision for the local networks in general and how they connect to our global vision. I was joined by Jouko and Valto we discussed our local networks, what’s next and how they will come together globally. Don’t let the word local fool you, it’s only a smokescreen.

Local partners will have a central role in developing the platform and we are constantly looking for more partners to join building our global community. If you share our vision and want to develop early phase funding, get in touch to explore possibilities of working together with us (partner@growvc.com)

Listen to the Podcast below or on iTunes.

Member highlight: MusikPitch

Some quotes from the episode:

  • .. build a social network of the startup and investment world.
  • .. this is not a sprint, it’s a marathon..
  • .. it’s important that they live the startup culture, that they understand the startup mentality..
  • Listen to Valto’s and Jouko’s messages to the community

 
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Virtual VC Co-Investment Model Launched
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
Google Buzz

Read the full press release here.

Yesterday, we launched an additional cornerstone to the community venture capital model. We see this step as one of many, toward creating a global funding community, with the proper tools to manage and cultivate innovations from all around the world. As several layers of funding institutions already exist, the idea has always been to utilize them together with prominent partners around the world, in creating a value-adding and more efficient operating way, to provide early phase companies with the right tools for success.

Keeping in line with the concept of creating a “Virtual Silicon Valley” and developing new models for more efficient early phase funding Grow VC rolls out the Virtual VC Co-investment Fund to enable VC’s to participate in Grow VC’s seed investments.

The first on board in this Virtual VC Co-Investment Fund is IndiaCo Ventures Limited, a profitable investment management firm listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

“The early stage startups space in India is an extremely exciting one and the virtual fund would open doors for VC’s to be a part of this promising market which has tremendous talent and potential given they get access to better funding options” states Rahul Patwardhan Vice Chairman and Managing Director at IndiaCo.

The development of our community has been at a great pace, yet we eagerly await the future where entrepreneurs have more equal opportunities in a global setting. Working with the actors that are passionate about building a better future, with a focus on entrepreneurship, we are confident we can unlock the tremendous potential in global startups.

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Closing our service investment round & moving on to first funding round
Friday, May 28th, 2010
Google Buzz

We’re now moving in such pace that some of the new stuff we do, quickly becomes yesterdays news and I almost forgot to share our yesterdays announcement also in here. Hit this link to read the release. In our release we announced our own Service Investment round with some great new members joining our team and also that we are now opening our own first funding round.

In case you didn’t know, Grow VC have been fully self funded for past two years, but now we feel ready and confident that it’s time to add a dose of rocket fuel and kick in another gear to extend our reach and add even more speed to our progress. Based on requests we get all the time, it feels that’s also what the people are expecting from us.

As mentioned in our release, we are planning to follow our own rules here and do our own funding round in the “Grow VC style”. So we are looking to do this as part Angel round and part crowdfunding.

For crowdfunding part, we still have some stuff to figure out, as using the community funding model we now have in our service, would perhaps be unfair for others if we would just jump in – so we are also thinking additional ways to structure it so that it would not be taking anything away from others in our service and ways where everyone can really feel to be part of Grow VC.  – Naturally if we find a good new model, we will release that for everyone else in our community to use as well.

So far, when meeting different people and also talking about us doing crowdfunding to Grow VC we have mostly got; “yes you should” -type of replies and many have even suggested it without us even asking. So we do think it would be only natural for us to do it and also feels it’s what’s expected from us.

Naturally we would like to get your feedback as well, so feel free to voice your opinion in the comments below, so we can get some discussions going :)

Should Grow VC crowdfund part of it’s funding round or not?

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Grow VC Service Investment Round – we do what we teach
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
Google Buzz

Grow VC has just launched its own Service Investment round. This means that we look for some people to work for Grow VC and we offer options for the company. At the moment we especially look for people that can help us in software development and business development in some regions. We have already now got applications from several very good candidates around the world.

How does it work in practice? We define an hour or week rate for each position. For example, we pay a person $750 a week for his part time work. This means $3,000 a month. And we look for four month work from this person. It means totally $12,000. We also pay an extra interest for this, for example, 10%. In this way the total compensation for the person is $13,200. Then we just divide this by our estimated valuation, we get an ownership percent, and we offer equal amount share options for the person.

Our proposal includes two alternatives:

  1. the person can convert the options to share
  2. he/she can sell them back the company in the next funding round, and get cash compensation from his work.

This is very straightforward model to get resources.

Why we make it in this way? First, we want to demonstrate this to all our members and startups in the service. Grow VC offers a Service Investment marketplace where all startups can look for resources in the same way. But it is not the main point; the main point is that we see this is now the best way to get right resources.  It is important to see that you don’t need a funding round and money to all resources, you can also get resources directly. This model enables many good people, who have no money to make investments, to invest in your company.

We also believe that in many cases in this way it is possible to get more committed people who also think company’s long term success. This kind of model attracts people who have a real entrepreneur mindset.  This is an effective way to build your team especially in an early phase.  Then after funding rounds you can have another compensation model them.

It is important to have very clear principles for this kind of round: how you calculate the compensation, how you convert it to ownership or money, and what are targets and milestones in the each task and role. We are going to publish tools (for example, Excel and agreement templates) to make this kind of Service Investment round. And we also publish more details about the results of our Service Investment round, when we have closed it.

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Would you like to be building the future of funding?
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Google Buzz
iSquint, Beatles, and Developers... what a mashup!
Image by izqrdo via Flickr

As we are moving forward, we are inviting new people to join our core team. If you are an entrepreneurial person and share our passion to build the platform for the future of startup funding, tell us why you would like to join us and why you would be a good fit to our team.

We are potentially looking for more than just one developer and the work can also be part time or per project bases. If we like what you have to offer, we’re happy to share more details about this opportunity.

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Introducing your Community Servant
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
Google Buzz

Every community needs it’s own Jonathan from Spotify, to bring you the latest updates and news – and that’s me. I thought I’d take a moment to introduce myself to all you avid followers of this here Grow VC Blog. At the start of this post, I vow to keep it clear of any “I like long walks on the beach..” – phrases. Here’s hoping I won’t have to eat my hat.

So “Hi There”, I’m Markus. Like any strictly formal introduction, I’ll stick a funny looking picture of myself to this post. I’m a passionate and driven individual who’s proud to be a part of something as game-changing as Grow VC. I’ve studied at two universities, Helsinki University of Technology and Hanken School of Economics, and could argue that I’ve learned a thing or two. I’m particularly fascinated about the subject of Entrepreneurship, both on a practical, real-life level, as well as on a theoretical level.

Personally, I believe there is a mismatch between what we say we want to achieve as large collective societies and what we are actually doing. Having experienced the world as an entrepreneur, I am dedicated to change the way we see entrepreneurship, but also to give entrepreneurship the spotlight in the economy it deserves. One could spend days discussing the cultural differences in entrepreneurship. Having lived in three different countries, Finland, Sweden and the US, I dare go out on a limb and argue that entrepreneurship is in no way glorified enough, in my experience, despite the often broad mentality gap between the Nordic countries and the US. In addition, I’m involved in developing the entrepreneurship scene, both on a global and local plateau – active Vice Chairman of Hanken Entrepreneurship Society – doing what I can to inspire and motivate others to broaden their own mental horizons. It starts with small nudges..

Funny-Looking Picture: Birthday Cake Edition

Funny-Looking Picture: Birthday Cake Edition

I believe we are on the cusp of change with the Grow VC community, bringing some efficient models and practices to the funding market. Now it’s time to light that spark within the community, get that snowball rolling and gathering momentum. I know there are many others like us, that believe in this change. I thank all of you, but encourage you to further stretch your reach and help others get inspired!

Here’s wishing you a great day!
Markus

Markus LinkedIN
Markus in the funding community

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Grow VC World Tour continues
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
Google Buzz
The Hollywood Sign as it appears from a trail ...

Image via Wikipedia

We try to meet people around the world as a part of our mission to get new startup funding models to work. Now when we have launched three main components,

  1. direct investments match-making
  2. service “sweat equity” investments
  3. community micro-funding

We plan to continue  meeting a lot of people, get feedback and develop services with users. You can always contact us, give feedback and ideas, but we really like to meet face-to-face.

We also like to meet local entrepreneur and business angel communities.

Here’s the cities we have visited so far:

Here’s the cities we are visiting this week:

  • Las Vegas (CTIA), March 22
  • Silicon Valley, March 23 and 25
  • Los Angeles , March 24
  • New York City, March 26 to 27

Upcoming after this week:

  • Paris, April 16
  • Berlin 11 to 12 May
  • Singapore, 1st to 2nd of June

As you can see we have added few more cities and even more cities will be announced as they are confirmed.

If you want to set up a meeting, or ask us to speak in your event please send email to contact@growvc.com or in Twitter @growvc. We are happy to come to tell more about the concept and get your ideas, how to get the startup funding work better! And you can also propose other dates in your area, and we try to organize a person from our team that is located around the world.

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Announcing local platforms
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Google Buzz

From day one when we started building our platform over a year ago, it’s been in our strategy to offer our platform to other organizations that are actively developing their local startup ecosystems around the world.

For us to be able to enable the community funding model, we have had to build a lot of additional functionality around it so it can cater to related functions as well, like the different roles, basic social networking, service investments etc. As such the platform itself is very capable to cater as a basic platform to startup funding activities and we are actively developing it forward.

After having received an increasing amount of feedback and confirmation that there is a need for our type of platform in many parts of the world, we are now officially announcing local platforms concept.local

In this concept, each platform can be run independently by the local partner and are offered as a software as a service. Loacl platforms can be directly connected to our global platform or run as isolated networks with their own rules. In these isolated platforms, the members can independently choose to join the global platform and activate their profile there if they like.

This way local platforms can also be more customized to cater for the local needs and those can also cater to wider spectrum of business segments (in addition to just web & mobile).

startup

There is two main models for local platforms.

  1. If a local partner has its own funding model: revenue share -the local partner pays revenue share to Grow VC for the rights to use the platform and services. Part of this revenue will also go to global community fund. Grow VC’s services are not directly available for the local partners members, but members can independently choose to join Grow VC’s
  2. If the local partner wants to use Grow VC’s model as is: to use of the platform is free for the local partner and all its members have access to Grow VC’s global services, the members pay Grow VC’s membership fee normally. The local partner can get additional revenue from its own services for the members and from its own partners.

Since the local platforms are offered as software as a service, local platforms will enjoy all the benefits of the global platform developments (including the pat. pending community-fund crowdfunding model) and the best practises of other local networks.

With this model, we want to help local ecosystems in different cities and countries around the world and also have a connection to global markets & contacts for everyone to benefit from these connections.  Ultimately being able help entrepreneurs and startups also in other industries to grow from their local markets to global markets within the familiar network.

The kind of partners we are looking for are the types that this kinda role feels natural, those that are active in their own startup ecosystem, currently organizing startup events, running local angel network or offering similar tools for the local ecosystem at he moment.

Since we are just announcing this, we are looking to start this with few selected partners, so that we can also manage all of the details efficiently with each partner.

If you are interested to run your local network in our platform, contact us via partner@growvc.com

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Podcast: Grow VC presentation at Sun, Sand and Startups event
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
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On Thursday the 18th of Feb just few days after our launch, the second triple-s/Founders Lounge co-production by Sun, Sand and Startups group took place at the Gran Foc, featuring a talk by Jouko, titled “New funding opportunities for web and mobile startups around the world”.

Thanks to Kristian and his team here is the recorded podcast from the event. Below is some of the topics from Jouko’s presentation:

You can listen for the podcast below and you can also subscribe to Grow VC podcast via iTunes. Sorry for the occasional background noise and that it was cut short at the end. Again big thanks to Kristian and his team.

 
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