Anything's Possible

 Thanks to several local leaders in the New England startup community, June is being celebrated as Innovation Month in New England.  Rather than being abstract about the many unique ways that our ecosystem nurtures startups, I thought I’d give a direct example of my previous company, which I’m not sure could have been born and raised anywhere else.

Brontes Technologies was based on research led by Dr. Janos Rohaly and Professor Douglas Hart out of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.  The investigators were among the first research teams to be funded by the Deshpande Center at MIT, which was created by local entrepreneurial guru Desh Deshpande out of a desire to fill the gap between academic research and commercialization. 

The company was born when two repeat entrepreneurs (Micah Rosenbloom and Eric Paley), both of whom came to Massachusetts to go to business school at Harvard, met the principal investigators at a MIT 50K Competition team-building mixer.  After initial tension resulting from speaking different languages (engineering and business), the team began to collaborate well due to the clear benefits of everyone bringing different disciplines to our preparation for two business plan competitions.  The team further gained confidence in each other after being named runner up at the MIT 50K and HBS Business Plan Competitions.  The team also received help from the Venture Mentoring Service at MIT and Professors Bill Sahlman, Joe Lassiter, Rebecca Henderson and Felda Hardymon at HBS.  Additionally Brontes got exposure and candid feedback by twice participating in the MIT Enterprise Forum (Concept and Startup Clinics). 

The company was originally financed by a true angel investor who based his decision completely on trust.  That angel was David Frankel, a business school classmate of mine and Micah’s and now our partner at Founder Collective.  Without David’s trust in us, Brontes would never have existed.  Angel financing was critical as it took the venture industry a bit of time to appreciate our quirky market.  That appreciation came first from Jeff Bussgang at Flybridge Capital Partners, whom I initially met in Professor Bill Sahlman’s Entrepreneurial Finance Class at HBS.  Jeff and I built a one year relationship in which he gave us feedback and coaching and got to know our team and mission well enough to make a bet on us.  Together we rallied two other local and outstanding venture capitalists, Ted Dintersmith of Charles River Ventures and James Nahirny of Bain Capital to help fund the company.  We also added two local independent board members, Kelsey Wirth the Founder of Align Technologies and Gerard Moufflet an investor with deep ties in our industry, who both provided enormous value to the company. 

We built a team of 32 extraordinary engineers, executives, and clinical specialists with deep experience in hardware, software, optics, computer vision, medical devices, dentistry and rapid manufacturing.  We relied on local vendors for additional optics design (Innovations In Optics) and industrial design (Manta) capabilities.  Early endorsements, industry insights and market validation came from Dean Bruce Donoff of Harvard School of Dental Medicine and Doctor Gerard Kugel of Tufts University School of Dental Medicine. 

It takes a great ecosystem to build a company.  There are few places in the world that Brontes Technologies could have been born and built. Thank you Massachusetts.  

*This blog has 27 links; all of which are to Massachusetts-based individuals and institutions that contributed to making Brontes Technologies a success.  

“I thought getting funded would be as simple as pitching my idea to a smart VC and getting a check based on the magnitude of the idea.” 

Two different first time entrepreneurs in their early twenties both made some version of this comment to me in the last month.  I like and respect both entrepreneurs and they were confiding in me that the fundraising process has been very disappointing and were seeking advice on how to close on some capital.

The fact is that raising money is really hard unless you’ve built a successful business before.  Of course, that actually makes some sense given that building a company is really hard and most venture-backed companies don’t return capital to investors.  The likelihood that an investor will fund a first time entrepreneur simply based on an interesting idea is exceptionally small.  Consider that the entrepreneur has an tremendous amount of conviction about the concept.  However, the investor has never heard the concept before and is likely hearing it (or at least this version of a theme) for the first time and is quite unlikely to share the depth of conviction that the entrepreneur holds.  In fact, a typical investor is regularly hearing credible ideas and cannot possibly fund them all.  Even if the investor is enthusiastic about the concept, she is likely meeting the entrepreneur for the first time and hasn’t yet established the trust and confidence needed to believe the entrepreneur has what it takes to execute the idea and be one of the few to succeed.

So what can a first time entrepreneur do to overcome the odds and get funding?  Here are a few tricks that I’ve seen work well:

Figure out who in the world you know that can afford to put some money into the company and believes in you without caring much about the idea.  Even if it is a small amount of money, this can be used to create more evidence that you’re building a fundable business.  The value of such trust networks is actually way more effective for raising money than the idea itself.  If the people you know that have the means to bet on you aren’t willing to fund you, why should you expect someone that you don’t know to fund you?

Find experts related to your business, preferably ones who have built a successful company in the same space, and sell them on your idea.  The more you can sell that person, and the more credible that person is, the better.  If that person signs up as an advisor, that’s helpful, but a director is better; signing up as an investor is much better and taking a leadership position on the team is the best.

The most important thing an entrepreneur can do prior to raising money is to keep building the business regardless of the funding situation.  Continue to validate the market opportunity and try to prove out that the founder’s convictions are right.  Build the team with people who will work for sweat equity.  Create some early product and show market traction. It is very hard to know when you will have enough evidence to convince investors, but an entrepreneur that can continuously show progress has a good shot of convincing investors that he is scrappy and capable.  When an investor is trying to figure out if an entrepreneur has what it takes, that ability to keep building the business is great evidence.  Certainly the entrepreneur should not sit around and wait for a check in order to really start building the business.  At some point if the company is showing meaningful signs of living up to the founder’s beliefs, it becomes very hard for investors to ignore.

At what point does an entrepreneur hit the wall and cannot live on ramen noodles alone? This is a very personal decision and the reason that most successful entrepreneurs have inspiring stories of perseverance.  It’s a question of objectively assessing the depth of the entrepreneur’s conviction, how much struggle he can endure, and how much progress he can make without capital.  First time entrepreneurs rarely get a benefit of the doubt from investors and getting funded is rarely easy.