Accessing capital through private market, whether it be venture capitalists or private investor has become obscure and rather unyielding for many ventures regardless of its stage, startup to matured.
Procuring capital requires immense understanding of both the public markets as well as private, educating oneself with the returns generated amongst industries and companies. It is validated that uninformed, naive founders will more like never see a penny of investment due to disconnect with reality, perhaps never even realizing that they have wasted so many years, and resources if any, or even burned through initial investors!
A stubborn human mind can either lead to major successes very rarely or for the most part lead to a path that is traveled by many founders, where one out of hundred make it, the rest ninety nine face devastation and failures. The financial ecosystem has been created such that regardless of market direction, there exists numerous opportunities to capitalize and make a prosperous exit with a well thought out strategy and model.
It is imperative that the founders understand the market dynamics and work on creating a forth leg of their venture, which can be leveraged to gain investors interest and hopefully yielding a constructive and a mutually beneficial engagement. Having an experienced team with eloquent credentials, market captivating product, intangible patents and structures has become just an average and just about every other ventures.
It is exactly due to these imbalances, Thawer Ashcroft Crowne & Co has created collateralized debt & equity structures for its clients where a portion of the capital is preserved, hedged, and leveraged via a secondary portfolio to secure security for the current and future investors, where a successful exit can be exercised especially due to illiquid stock of a privately held venture. These structures are simply an enhancing structure, giving investors assurance and options to exit at appropriate milestone rather then being illiquid till IPO, which many don't make it.
Collateralized debt structures are over a few trillion dollar industry, yet very little is known about them by many ventures. This creates Real Money, which is tangible unlike patents, ideas, concepts that cannot be leveraged for the most part. Being an investor, nothing is more assuring then to know that there is an exit strategy where you will capitalize and be Liquid! Most of the high net worth investors don't necessary have cash in their accounts, but rather piece of paper such as warrants, or even stocks, bonds, etc.
My thoughts: Educate yourself, and keep an open mind, you will always be a student of life and never a teacher so long as there are other free minds out there who are constantly innovating new ideas and concepts, this is the very reason you see major companies such as Google acquiring small companies. Also, not all investors, or high net worth individuals leave in a mansion, take Mark Zuckerberg's (CEO of Facebook) modest living, a new breed of investors.
