Raising money in a recession

April 18, 2008 by Dave Haynes

I have been in on a few discussions with money guys lately, as clients try to get their financing together for rollouts. The common message: really, really have your act together.

The wobbly US economy has made investor cash much harder to come by than it was even a few months ago.

Screens.tv has an interview piece up with the head of an early stage investment group in New York, and the guy has one particularly strong summary of what anyone who’s starting a network needs to have organized.

“To get professionally funded and beat out the other 99 companies looking for the same dollars, you are going to have to be firing on all cylinders,” says David S. Rose, chairman of investment group New York Angels. “That means you need a great and experienced management team, a carefully-thought-out business model, a truly unique selling point, existing access to your customer base, a very realistic and rational pre-money valuation, and a very, very good answer as to why your business should not be simply a customer for one of the other myriad solution providers already in the market.”

Simply put, you typically need way more than an interesting notion and some contracts.

Rose says there is money out there, and a belief among savvy investors that the advertising landscape is changing and moving this way. But as he says, anyone who wants money better be seriously buttoned down with his or her plans.

  1. […] and desktops of the offices of London media companyLondon, 17 April, 2008: Exterity, …   Raising money in a recession I have been in on a few discussions with money guys lately, as clients try to get their financing […]

  2. aideycot says:

    Strangely enough yesterday was the deadline for a UK article entitled “The Lure of an IPO, the pitfalls of AIM” and we just managed to submit 2,000 words in time, it started…

    “In the current economic climate it might be a little strange to be talking about raising money but trust us, plenty of folks in the digital out of home sector have been doing so and most, if not all of them quite successfully.

    Literally in the last few months we have seen the likes of Breezetech, Screen Technologies Ltd, Obus plc (ultimate owners of IntaTV) and probably most impressively Vision Media Group (formerly ScreenFX) all raise significant amounts of money.

    Add to that Avanti Screen Media’s ongoing fund raising initiatives, which many, including ourselves believe will shortly be successful and it paints quite a rosy picture of our industry sector!”

    It’s tough out there but we have NOT seen any let up in the interest in the sector from VCs, HNWs and angels.
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