antipattern

Have you heard of Google dust? Its like fairy dust but only much better. Sprinkle this stuff on a startup and you have a guaranteed success your hands.

OK, this is really what your favorite venture capitalist is thinking:

Those guys who just pitched me all worked for Google, and boy Google made a lot of money! I will just give them a huge amount and we will all be rich! They will hire all their other Google friends who are getting bored from all those free lunches. And the Google guys know everything because they are all so really clever, you know with all those clever interview questions and all. Like how many beanie babies fit into a manhole, or something like that. And they are all so young, got their Google jobs straight out of school. So clever.

OK, so I am really not kidding.

I ran into a Google dust startup recently, and wanted to know how they are going to make money, and actually what their go to market strategy is. It was a bit of a hard and awkward conversation. There was not much there there, and I though best not to push onward with my line of questioning. After a while, they realized something was off themselves, and retreated to discuss this among themselves. The CEO sent me an email later explaining that they really have thought about it, and tried to explain a little more. It did not really compute and I felt bad for them.

I suspect they thought since they were just going to make a lot of money because they came from Google. Somehow, I think it is going to be a bit of a humbling experience when they discover they are not strapped to the rocket ship that is Google any more.

For that one you just had to hang on and not fall off.