STARTUP funding? Reach out.

    Greetings,


    Some of you know me from being an advocate for Brilliant Light Power. Yes, but really I'm an advocate for new forms of transformational technologies.

    In my experience startups in this space have the following issues

    • failure to focus on external company building (fundraising, messaging, partnerships) which is the CEO job and it is full time
    • failure to build the team
    • failure to communicate with public and brand (at a later stage, but needed even early to build company and fundraise)
    • failure to forsee that the startup itself, is a fledgling invention of your creation and it is more likely to fail first unless careful consideration is given


    I am to available to help people avoid what is usually obvious failure. The very skills that make someone successful as a lone inventor or researcher, are antithetical to building a startup.


    I do fundraising of seed rounds through GVC Partners.


    Feel free to pm me if you are thinking of fundraising, or just want to talk about what you are doing from a strategy point of view.


    Best regards,

    Navid

    Everything is working out for me, there is a geological theory of cold nuclear fusion, it helps me a lot and I will find it!!!

    Quote from WJMFC

    Can you tell us the typical compensation conditions that GVC Partners would request?

    GVC Partners is an investor, not seeking compensation.


    Venture investors are pretty consistent, they price a round with an expected dilution of 20%.
    Investors are buying a part of the company. You should enter with the awareness that they are taking risk and have a high failure rate (most of their investments fail). You should aim that investors aren't just cheques, but help you in some way (connections, hiring, technical expertise, industry expertise, network, HR, design or marketing)


    In this space, people should not be afraid of venture capital if they find the right partners. The failure of a founder is trading so much of the company away, that the team walks away after a few rounds because they were diluted so much and don't have a big payday on IPO. In this space, if you can raise $20-30mil which might only take 2-3 rounds you may have huge potential income streams and even the technical team holding a small % would be a huge payday.


    In short, founders in the new energy space are irrational if they are afraid of venture capital, and we must beat their hard headedness with basic financial models.

    Quoted from Navid "In short, founders in the new energy space are irrational if they are afraid of venture capital, and we must beat their hard headedness with basic financial models."


    Really? Founders are indeed rational and fear not venture capital but only the venture capitalists. It feels a bit like an inexperienced player joining a poker game against card sharks. This distracts the founders attention from invention. Hard-headedness comes from single-mindedness of purpose and is required for invention. Karl Marx had a basic financial model...that has not worked out too well. In fairness Marxism may not be as foolish as modern monetary policy. You can print money while fighting inflation by raising taxes!

    Quote from Thor

    Quoted from Navid "In short, founders in the new energy space are irrational if they are afraid of venture capital, and we must beat their hard headedness with basic financial models."


    Really? Founders are indeed rational and fear not venture capital but only the venture capitalists. It feels a bit like an inexperienced player joining a poker game against card sharks. This distracts the founders attention from invention. Hard-headedness comes from single-mindedness of purpose and is required for invention. Karl Marx had a basic financial model...that has not worked out too well. In fairness Marxism may not be as foolish as modern monetary policy. You can print money while fighting inflation by raising taxes!

    If as an investor I found an inventor who thought I was playing poker with them, then I think its a good potential failure sign for the startup. There are many things you can distrust but people with money to invest in venture by far are looking for transparency all around.


    This isn't poker, its human relationships and investment. For some inventors learning how this style of investment may be had by finding angel investor groups and pitching them.

    Now if In-Q-Tel gives you a call, that's a different situation!

    The probability of success though is increased if the 'pool of sharks' has to swim in the open seas, like the life-saving whales, dolphins and other mammalian species including human surfers, swimmers and deep-sea divers. These constitute the 'so called' ethically good 'angel investors'. Unless, of course they turn out to be 'Hell's Angels'. investment in anything, these days, seems to be just a random mess - especially with digital bitcoin currencies which are backed on the dark web by smuggling Class A drugs around the Globe.

    If you don't believe me read 'Gomorra' and the sequel 'The Piranha' by Roberto Saviano who clearly states that 'London is the cocaine capital of the World' and is where the Comorra mafia launder all their capital. I met him recently in hospital, suffering from a breakdown after being endlessly pursued by mafia hit-squads for exposing their Napoli-based operation. He has to have 24/7 police protection and had two armed guards even in hospital!

    Quote from Alan Smith

    Anybody working on disruptive technologies knows or soon discovers that they are swimming in a pool of sharks.

    There are hundreds of solid VCs. The issue in this space as you say is that most of the startups aren't organized and structured in a way that a tech startup is. So none of the traditional VCs are coming out to play. And for sure angel investors need simple stories, strong communications, and timeframes to product that are realistic. Anything that looks like an R&D project is not an investment, but a lottery ticket. An experienced investor has seen more failures than you, so they have a feeling for teams that have a likely path to success. Remember, there are tens of routes to failure - not just the tech, but getting hit by a bus, or the team falling apart or, or, or. A positive attitude is a big tell.


    New energy is a controlled space, so surely many of the groups that come out to play financially are deep state. I already mentioned one. And there are board members on here who are clearly affiliated with deep state and people don't bat an eye.

    I have raised tens of millions of dollars both for my own startups as well as others. The VC world today is so different than even five or ten years ago. There’s a lot more money chasing projects than good projects. There is also a ton of help available for those that are not as experienced (and old…) as myself.


    Most of the fear of VCs I read about here is quite anachronistic in my view. That being said there are a lot of political forces pulling in many directions here but that’s not unexpected. The successful companies will be the ones that are able to navigate well and sort the wheat from the chaff but if you have a great idea that isn’t being funded best you start by looking in the mirror.

    We are relatively new in this field as a small group of researchers, mostly called 'SAM-team". We would love to have some sort of funding for our foundation so that we can pursue some experiments that would conclusively show transmutations to take place under very 'mild' circumstances, with almost no effort at all.
    To my mind transmutations have hardly ever been acknowledged and the word (transmutations) is mostly shunned, feared and ridiculed, yet we as a think-tank see that evidence literally all over the place and that for a century or so. So we are going to try and do just that, show a repeatable, verifiable simple and cheap experiment that shows transmutations conclusively but more on that later on perhaps..

    All the noise is just that, noise and projects that lead to nothing for all kinds of reasons. We see millions (very small in comparison to other fields) utterly wasted while the simple proof of transmutations is still not even there. Lets start with that, and then acknowledge that transmutations are the real phenomenon here and not "cold fusion". BUT that is as said not possible, so no-one really invests, and those that do, follow some empty really juicy promise that never works out. Rossi anyone? That is an ongoing hoax of huge proportions and doing tremendous amount of damage to the field. So 99.9 % of the world will keep thinking that 'hot fusion' and QM will fix everything and transmutation (cold fusion) are a fairy tale. Expect when talking future science, then we point at science fiction movies where it has all been solved.

    It seems to me that we really do not want solutions, just the chase to it, with a nice juicy pay for it.

    btw, Eugene Mallove showed the world why we are in this state, clear-cut fraud and misrepresentation on the P&F experiment (done by MIT!), sabotaged repeat experiments and an unheard of attack from 'mainstream' scientist with everything nasty but actual mud throwing. No one (almost) talks about that.

    The nucleus is organized (duh) and the late Norman Cook carried that message as a true gentleman and I hear nothing about it anymore. Did he not show important conclusions, namely that there is no decent atomic model that explains things?! How can we do scientific research in this field chasing "cold fusion' when we in truth have very wrong models to work with, let alone some form of consensus.

    We need to take ownership of this all (the cold fusion, the atomic models, the fundaments of physics) otherwise we will never ever succeed and be put in place by the prestigious professors that explain to us that 'hot fusion' will be ready in 25 years and transmutations are a hoax while dreaming about wormholes taking us to another dimension with untold riches made by diamond core planets and infinite energy from the vacuum. just don't hold your breath.....


    A few other issues in the field are;
    - The science community does not know nor understand project-management on a decent level! Meaning projects fail due to poor management, planning, risk evaluations, follow-up actions and lesson learned reports for example.
    - fragmented world where everyone look suspicious at everyone, wanting to have the ultimate invention to become super rich or famous. We actually need to be much more cooperative and not throw in the next model that is often meant to impress, and not to give answers or be useful.
    - The scientific community does not really utilize or acknowledge the power of IT solutions. Communication, 3D modelling and integrated monitoring of all the experiment data in real time for example can be of great assistance. That stuff however requires money as well and is mostly skipped in projects.

    Everything pointed out here is based on the message of many others in the community and they are fat better at it then I every could be. My case in point is that we do nothing with this and just stumble along in the dark.

    Edo
       

    Quote from Edo

    It seems to me that we really do not want solutions, just the chase to it, with a nice juicy pay for it.

    Good points Edo. I would like to say that, at the frontier it is very hard to build "we" -- think Mills vs Pons/Fleischmann.
    Also scientific minded people don't like history, so there is little institutional memory - things are forgotten and relearned a decade later.


    Transmutations are a good start, but even better is finding experiments that can be self-funded, that lead to a demo, that can lead to funding, that can lead to growing a modest business, that can create corporate learning, that can feed into new developments.

    Even modest-new energy tech like long duration storage takes years of small innovations...

    UK Innovate appear to have listened to my heavy-duty nagging about the way they distribute grants - too many safe bets, not enough innovation support IMHO. This is UK companies only but the scheme is what is needed to support new ideas and methods. Well done!


    £30 million Fast Start boost for cutting-edge start-ups
    Innovate UK is launching a brand new series of grants worth £30 million to back innovative UK businesses in fast starting innovation and boosting the UK…
    www.ukri.org

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