As you may now, I’m currently raising a seed round for my latest venture, VR-WEAR (For those whom I didn’t yet pitch, VR-WEAR designs produces and sells Virtual Reality devices for video games). As the French seed market got pretty hard to address since the September crisis and as I’m looking for quite a lot of money (500-700k€ which is pretty big for seed in France) I though I might give a try to those dating sites between angel investors and entrepreneurs and I must confess I’m a bit troubled by the results.
I registered on two of those, Capital PME which is edited by OSEO, the French Innovation agency, and Capangel from a local startup.
First of all it feels always a bit strange to fill so intimate data about your project in those “public” places. I almost feel like now that it’s there I should make a video of the presentation and post in on my blog while I’m at it… and that definitely sounds wrong.
What’s even more puzzling is that a lot of the people viewing my company’s profile obviously are newbies in both technology startups and angel investing which basically leads to pretty heavy differences of point of view. For instance I had a funny talk with one guy who did not spend one sec trying to understand what it is we’re trying to achieve with VR-WEAR but instead only was worrying how we are valuating the company after the September crisis…
While I was thinking those kind of initiatives were pretty meaningful for private investors willing to find some fun projects to invest in as heir risk is really limited thanks to the latest tax savings regulations, after that kind of interactions I’m getting pretty worried that the lack of experience in that very specific field of expertise which is investing in technology startups is going to be a real problem both at the investment phase and afterwards…
What is your opinion ? Should a startup looking for seed be on those uncontrolled websites where anyone can register as an investor and were no check is done on wether one has any capacity of investment and any expertise (or has understood the risks and the usual dynamics of how things usually work) over that specific type of investments?
Update : On CapAngel it seems that I must send out an invitation code to anyone willing to access my company profile – sounds reasonable… It’s not how Capital PME handles it though.