Things have been moving along pretty well. We’ve opened a Fargo office where our development team is based. We’ve got a paper partner with whom we are developing IC/paper integration processes. We’ve identified our initial market and have a lead customer in place. And we’ve established a timeline that gets our first product on the market by mid-2015. All that’s missing is the money to make this happen!
I’ve spent the good part of the last few months preparing to talk to investors. This has involved the creation of a two-page executive summary and a 15-20 slide presentation. Each of these documents went through about ten iterations with my team and advisers before I had something that I felt was ready to share.
I’m not yet certain what types of investors I am seeking. I’ve encountered two schools of thought. One is that I should raise as much money as I can as early as I can and the other is that I should only raise as much as I need for the particular stage my company is at. The first approach would imply I talk to venture capitalists while the second would imply wealthy individuals and angel investors.
To start, I’ve selected just a few investors of each type to see how my story is received and learn more what these different funding strategies might look like. By September things should hopefully be more clear and I can then focus in on a particular strategy and investor type.