Charles River Ventures has launched a QuickStart load program. This is similar to the Y!Combinator seed funding program and the LGiLab program aimed at finding seed investments. There’s lots of comments over at TechCrunch and further analysis at VentureBeat
Josh Kopelman provides an interesting challenge to the economics of seed funding for larger funds. Places like Austin Ventures “re-integrated” it’s seed stage fund (aka incubator) in 2002. The 2 most interesting points that Josh brings up are:
- Lack of alignment of bridge loan lender and the entrepreneur in next round valuations
- External optics related to seed investor participation in the next round
These are challenges, and I’m sure that Sutha will have a different opinion than Josh. And there is more from Fred Wilson. It’s a challenge to find angels or early-stage firms like Ycombinator that develop entrepreneurs and companies. It’s a very different incubation model, i.e., incubate the people, the company, the technology—DON’T provide them space. (If you’re looking for angel funding here is a great directory of angel associations around the world).