I think the organizer should have been upfront with you about what he/she wanted you to talk on. That said, I don't think it was an offensive request. The organizer wasn't being presumptuous that you would be interested in speaking on this topic just because you're female -- he/she was merely asking you... As a woman in tech, I get how it's these little things compounded over time that get annoying, but this ask on its own is not unreasonable is it? You can always just say no (as you did). :)
Do we need to pander to VCs? I'm also not sure that your assertion that it hurts their credibility is true.
Fred Wilson has publicly admitted himself that he hasn't led a deal all year. I don't think that affects his reputation. If anything, I think people applaud him for his transparent efforts.
The VC industry works like stocks. Its more what people are believing than actual hard numbers. Speculation is the name of the game. And speculation is driven by hearsay. So, that is why traction is a popular term these days, and why "founders" hate to talk about actual money earned. You can hear them say But with more investment we can get more traction and thus leverage the market towards using our product. Which is wall street talk for We heard $some_company is going to close a huge deal. We can't say when exactly, but its going to happen. We want to leverage the current stock price to gain a couple of extra points when the sale goes through.
While the data may not be 100% accurate, I think the author makes a lot of great points about finding out what series A deals a particular investor has done to know whether this is a good fit.
> These are partners at venture firms who are 3-5 years into investing their fund, don’t have very strong results so far, and are struggling to raise new funds.
The post is manipulative because it defines zombie VC's as above. However, the data used to arrive at the list does not hold up to the above definition.
If I were to do that all over again, I would've focused on building an audience around a pinterest-like blog or FB page with cool retail items so that we would've had people to launch to.
Soneca, you are absolutely right. In this case, we shut it down, and my co-founder decided to move on. This just wasn't meant to be. After that, I decided to team up with a different friend of mine, and we are working on LaunchBit. So, while that was the end for Parrotview, it's not the end of my startup journey. :)
Good question! I've found it's easiest through progress in this manual sort of way. It's a much easier pitch to say, "hey, I need you, because we have all these paying customers who are going crazy, because there is no website" than it is to say I have "this awesome idea but no one is using it yet."
They are speaking at the Lean Startup conf right now. Amazing idea -- they create mushroom kits so ppl can grow them in their own home. They use used coffee grounds from Peet's all around the Bay Area.
