Over on his BeyondVC blog, Ed Sim has a great rant about the misuse of Web 2.0 in venture pitches:
Frankly I do not care if you are Web 2.0, Web 1.0, etc. All I care about is what your service or product does, why it is valuable to the end user, why it is uniquely different from the competition, what the barriers to entry are, and how you plan on reaching your customers and how you will ultimately make money.
There’s great advice for would-be entrepreneurs in this piece. Be sure to follow the links and read Jeff Jarvis’ piece on why small is the new big and why this creates problems for VCs and would-be venture-backed entrepreneurs.
Like Ed, I’ve been deluged with pitches for what will at best be features of next generation products. In this early frothy period, some of these projects are going to get funded, some of them will even be acquired by companies looking to buy some clue, or perhaps just to acquire some promising talent, but in the long run, you have to think about building businesses that you’d want to own, not just hope to flip.