

Ask HN: What are some concrete ways in which VCs help startups? - sendos

I'm new to the whole startup world, and from what I've been reading and hearing, in addition to the money that VCs/Angels/Seed funds give, they also provide a lot of help in the form of guidance, getting you in contact with "the right people", etc.<p>I can roughly see what the above means, but, for those of you who have gone through this experience, can you provide some concrete examples of how a VC/Angel/Seed fund helped your startup (besides giving money)?<p>For example, a site like Digg, when it gets started, besides having a functional and easy-to-use website, it needs to get the word out that it exists. Do VCs/Angels/Seed funds help more with getting the talent required to get the website up and running, or more with getting the word out (e.g. by having contacts in the media), or by some other way?
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Some of what VCs and earlier stage investors do is the same, but some is very
different. For example, two of the biggest things we do are help people come
up with and modify their ideas, and teach them how to raise money from VCs.
Whereas VCs expect you already to have decided what you're working on, and by
definition don't need to teach you how to convince VCs. But VCs can do stuff
like help you hire senior executives or (should you be so lucky) arrange IPOs,
which we know nothing about.

We spend our time mostly on early problems like the initial idea, the
relationship between the cofounders, how to launch, who to get as your initial
users, how to convince later stage investors to give you more money, and (for
startups that want to) early stage acquisitions. VCs focus on how to take a
promising little company and turn it into a big company, including growing
revenues, growing the organization, and big acquisitions or IPOs.

Roughly speaking, the earliest stage of investors focus on helping the
aircraft get off the runway, and VCs focus on helping it get to 35,000 feet.

It's harder to generalize about angels. Some invest $10k and some invest
almost as much as VCs. Some are very active and others are completely hands
off.

