Vulture Capitalists

Scaling up a search engine cluster is hard - but scaling up a business is sadly harder. Meg and I wasted six months talking to these guys - "Vulture Capitalists".

To be fair to the VC's, they're only doing their job - which is to get an answer to this question: "show me the money?" Our conversations went something like this:

We've developed cool technology.
"Show me the money?"
It's a multi-billion dollar industry.
"Show me the money?"
Intellectual capital.
"Ohhh ... Show meeee the moneeeeyy????!!"

Ok, it wasn't quite like that, but you get the idea. Unfortunately, at the time we didn't have any money, which is why we were seeking funding in the first place. Even though we didn't manage to convince any VC's that we were a sure-bet we were totally convinced.

Technically speaking our business just had a scalability problem - in the financial department. Meg and I discussed a change to our business model so we could gracefully grow the business without funding. Within one month we turned a corner and haven't looked back since - and there's no VC in sight!