Comments on: The way to seed startups

By: UK government creates £150m fund to help VCs back startups. Good for you? Or just the VCs?

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:11:45 +0000

[...] Part of this initial £150 million will come from £750 million strategic investment fund the government announced in April to provide financial support to high-tech companies. That announcement sparked a wave of debate on TechCrunch Europe, with an open letter from Angel investor Robin Klein and two further responses. [...]

By: When is a startup a startup?

When is a startup a startup? — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:52:02 +0000

[...] related blogs on this subject: Let a thousand start ups boom. source: TechCrunch Europe The way to seed start up’s. source: TechCrunch [...]

By: Jean Carl Cohen

Mon, 04 May 2009 05:19:31 +0000

I have decided to create an Open Seed Fund Project in France called http://www.frogventure.com
It will be based on ycombinator model and people are showing great enthousiasm about it.

By: Martin Owen

Martin Owen — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:06:52 +0000

Single Investment Fund( R & D) in Wales is what SMART has become locally. You have a Tech counsellor before and during to help with the application. The proposal and the quartery + final reports are externally vetted.

£100K + is available in Wales

By: Jens

Jens — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:36:01 +0000

@ Sue Greenwood

In terms of monitoring: that is the whole point of a grant program. You don’t need to do any extensive monitoring. You can check the performance of companies at Companies House. Cheap, quick and easy.

It think there were two people at DTI responsible for administrating the SMART awards. That was it. They handed out hundreds of awards. I think the administration cost was less than 5% of the money awarded. However, I can also tell you of programs where they tried to invest money (equity and loans) and where the costs were ca. 55% of the total budget. SMART awards were massively efficient by comparison.

I also had a very good look at the list of SMART award funded companies. This list was kept sort of secretly at the time (the UK government fears nothing more than transparency of what they do, it seems from time to time) and was very difficult to get hold of. When I went through that list, it became clear that what pulled down the impact of the SMART award were all the projects funded at existing companies. After all, if an established company required £45k to run a project after several years of being in business, then this company can’t be doing too well!

By: Martin Owen

Martin Owen — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:26:05 +0000

The Single Investment Fund( R & D) in Wales will/can work for me. As a %grant I still have to take some risk. It does not pay for everything ( our big cash costs are IP protection).

It does give us control over our exit/development strategy in a way that equity would not.

I have to put up a good case as to why I will not fail – but I will be able to fight again with what I have learned if I do.

By: Andrew Bredon

Andrew Bredon — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 06:18:57 +0000

Does anyone know of a similar scheme to the SMART programme in the South East/London? I just seed funded jobwhizz to the tune of £30k+ and so would be interested in some further funding to build next phase of the project…

thanks, bredo

By: Sue Greenwood

Sue Greenwood — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:53:39 +0000

The idea of the SMART programme sounds good however I would question whether it really did work that well? In my experience, we already seem to have dozens of over-monitored, impossible to access govt-backed grant and equity schemes in the UK, and I strongly suspect that if we looked more closely at the ‘data and evidence’ we’d find a disproportionate amount of the money going into managing and monitoring the fund-giving.

By: Let a thousand startups boom

Let a thousand startups boom — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:13:16 +0000

[...] Robin Klein’s letter open letter to the UK government about how to stimulate startups got a lot of response from TechCrunch Europe readers. We’ve decided to run two responses to his letter, making their own case for how government intervention should take place. The below is by Simon Cast, (@Simoncast) a strategic analyst with Market Clusters. The other response is here. [...]