As someone not in the valley (we work out of NYC) I have had a completely different experience.

After many years in the industry doing all kinds of senior developer jobs, I started a company called Qbix in 2011. We spent zero on marketing, and attracted 5 million users around the world. They use our apps millions of times a month.

I have spent seven years building the technology that will decentralize Facebook the way the Web decentralized AOL. We want to unleash the same amount of wealth as the Web did.

Our platform has tons of reusable components for communities. It’s built like BSD - a cathedral approach. We open sourced it and eventually it will be as easy to make your own app as it is to host your own blog.

And we have a roadmap for the next 10 years, to decentralize much further, which you can see at https://qbix.com/blog

Here is my point:

This whole time we have hustled and went to conferences. We were nice, charming, smart, had a growing user base, technology kept getting better, and so on. I met Roelof Botha from Sequoia at Techcrunch Disrupt in NYC around 2009. I met Ron Conway there and he had his son Topher look at our stuff. I met Albert from USV from commenting on his blog. A lot of our views are aligned. I have a determination and passion to make a billion dollar company, while changing the world. If they would bet on anyone, they would bet on...

Startups like Color, Kik Messenger and CryptoKitties. Seriously. Some of whom are then never heard from again.

Who did we raise money from?

Angels. All the time. Individuals. And next ee are trying crowdfunding.

I just find that there is too much that goes into impressing VCs to make it your goal if you don’t have connections to begin with. Having recently learned what happens on the other side of the table (one of our advisors is a crypto VC) I see that it requires a lot of 24/7 fundraising itself, from family offices and so on.

While I enjoy that kind of shmoozing etc. it is a big time sink for what we’re trying to do. We just want to raise the next $100K and then grow our metrics, userbase and recenue 10x, and repeat. Maybe indie.vc would do it. But to most VCs this is a joke. We have tried to raise $1M round with VCs. Not worth the running around. I heard Reid Hoffman speak he said he went to 100 VCs to raise his first money and majority turned him down. And this was shortly after the dot com boom.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand it’s hard to run a fund. Some funds have it made, others have to hustle. But we are builders, and the VC industry doesn’t seem to actually be geared towards that any more than the music industry A&R dept was for artists. Spotify and Patreon came along and artists jumped. If innovative crowdfunding pops up to raise millions, the same thing will happen. It’s mostly the US regulators who are making innovation harder in that space, so you still have gatekeepers and the kind of dynamics we see.

Something like this would be superb: invest $10K, have people hit some lowhanging fruit metrics, then put the next $100K, amd so on. Have a roadmap. That aligns much more with builders.

Edit: YC is much closer to this ideal. But there is some scarcity in terms of geography and having to move to SF. I just want to have a roadmap and milestones and a common online framework for people to use. They make it to the next milestone? Great. If not they can keep trying. The price of the money can vary and go up if they take too long. But all this other running around is, honestly, in my opinion, beside the point. Especially for those guys in Nairobi or Romania.