Open Source Venture Capital by Mark Cuban

Maybe we should pitch? I dunno (we are looking for capital to grow and hire people … go figure). Here is his post. His criteria are simple, and quite good:

That is, for him to invest, you have to open your idea up. If it is defensible, and you have a shot, he might sign on. However, he might not. How is this different from the VC meet/greet events that you have to pay $1000+ for, in order to present your idea to “funders”? Its not? Hmmm… ok, apart from the $1000, it isn’t. And since it is unlikely you will get funded … it is really more similar to these events than you might think. That is, this is a good idea. I had proposed using the SBA as a way to get money to small businesses in need, Mark suggests jumpstarting risk taking. He is right. Have a look at his post and his comments. We need more folks with capital thinking about how to leverage it like he is talking about. Sort of like Y-combinator or similar “incubators”. On Scalable’s side, we have a good story and will be looking for money to help us grow (or a friendly acquisition to get us the resources to go after larger markets) soon. We need to build demo units, run benchmarks, get more code on the accelerators … Many more things in the queue as well that we would love to do if we had the capital. But we don’t, so every dollar counts. We have product in market, customers, are cash flow positive and profitable. Meet all of his criteria. Would we post to this? I dunno. Huge noise level, very little signal in the comments to him. Regardless, more power to him, and I hope this is successful. I’d like to see more of this.