called
Garage.com. Garage later evolved into an investment bank designed to help entrepreneurs raise money from venture capitalists and finally morphed into Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm that makes direct investments in early-stage technology companies. Today, Garage Technology Ventures receive between 300-400 new opportunities per year, making on average about 10 investments.
According to Guy his years as a tech entrepreneur taught him a number of invaluable lessons. “I learned pretty quickly that entrepreneurs should focus their energy on three things- creating a great product, selling that product and collecting the money you make from selling it. Everything else is bull shiitake. Not having a lot of capital helps you focus on these three activities. Having a lot of capital encourages you to be all over the place. This is why too much money is worse than too little.”
“Too much money, you lose touch with reality- the line of thinking is usually ‘investors gave us this money not to sit on, they gave it to us to invest’, so we need to buy expensive luxuries in the mistaken belief that it will make the business more productive.”
“Today if you are a tech entrepreneur- generally speaking everything you need is cheaper than it was before or even free. Look at marketing- if you use social media, twitter, or blogs, then marketing is pretty much free or very cheap. You need infrastructure- in the past this meant you needed a room full of servers and back-ups servers in the event of problems, whereas now you can call up a cloud computing provider and you have space in the cloud for peanuts. You need people, and as awful as it sounds, during a recession people are free or cheap. You may no longer need a physical office as the world is going virtual and tools thanks to open source are largely free these days. Everything you need is free or cheap and as a start up you don’t need the money you needed before. It’s a good time to start a business.”
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