April 01 2008
Editorial – Win a million pound funding for your ideas
The London Technology Fund has £1 million to invest in a good startup. But don’t get your hopes up, if IRs experience is anything to go by.
The London Technology Fund is running a competition for technology startups. The prizes include a share of up to £1m in investment funding and over £100,000 worth of training and advice. The deadline for submission of entries is 30th June 2008. Winners will be announced at a ceremony to be held on 29th October 2008.
I did this back in 1999 with Internet Works magazine. I persuaded a friendly VC after much phone haranguing to give us a prize-fund of £250,000. We trailed the competition in the magazine, including a 50 point WIN £250,000 splash on the front of the magazine, and we made it very easy for anyone to enter, including printing guides on how to write a successful business plan.
After all the publicity we had given the competition I was a little disappointed that three months later I sat in a room with the VCs and I had just 150 business plans to show them. But they seemed happy to have 150, so I thought we must be doing something right. After ten minutes discussion we decided to allot ourselves two hours to flick through the plans. Yes I said TWO HOURS, which is a little less than a minute per business plan, and I bet you thought elevator pitches were short !
It was the most amusing two hours I've had in years. Plus it also gave me a keen insight into how VCs work.
While there weren’t any plans for anti-gravity machines, there were a few business plans that were so out of touch with reality that you wondered if they’d been written by people on day-release. Around 30% were ideas that had already been done a million times before. 10% were ideas that would need a great deal more than £250,000 and 20% just wouldn’t scale fast enough or get to a stage that any sort of return could be made.
Of the 150 I think we ended up with 5 candidates that we all looked at and thought , "yes that’s a potential". We then spent another 30 minutes ripping those ideas to pieces.
We never gave away the prize, there just wasn't any idea good enough, and in the end we gave one business £2,500 seed funding, I wonder where they are now? If you feel lucky then the address is http://www.londontechnologyfund.com/competition/index.php but don't hold your breath.
