A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

A great article “Tech Entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky: You Can Build Your Start-up Without Venture Capital.” at Informilo. Some snippets worth reading:

“In Spain,  examples of these kind of businesses include  Meneame and Panoramio, now part of Google Earth.  In the U.S., recent examples are Digg, Friendfeed and Techmeme. Actually some of the world’s most successful technology companies were started without any early stage venture funding, including the likes of Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, Oracle and eBay.”

“With little money to run on you’ll need to solve problems and inefficiencies as they appear and this will build a valuable frugality and efficiency culture into your company.”

“All these trends push towards a world in which VCs could lose much of their relevance, at least for what concerns early stage financing of Internet and software start-ups. These startups will require little or no money to start, capital that can be provided by “friends and family”.  Angel investors can get in later to help grow the business, and funding from VCs, if ever needed, will help scaling the operation at a later stage.”

This article can somewhat be seen as guideline or description of what we followed at Tagcrumbs, founding team 2 developers one business person, Amazon Web Services (virtual Internet company), Open Source (Rails, PostgreSQL, PostGIS,…), external APIs, product first,  internationalization,… Bootstrapping for the sake of having more time without external pressure and trying to focus on the perfect placemarking experience, especially in a mobile context.