Why Founders Co-op sucks less than venture capitalists?

Disclaimer: I've personally been part of founding teams that have raised over $40,000,000 in venture capital. I've made a lot of money personally working with venture capitalists and plan to continue to do so.   For some ideas and some ventures, venture capital makes a ton of sense. That said, I co-founded Founders Co-op because I thought that the venture capitalist market has holes in it and I'd like to fill those holes.

So does founders co-op suck less (and yes -- as investors we still suck -- i.e. if you can bootstrap your company with no investors you should do so!!!)?

1. We're entrepreneurs and founders too. We know what it takes to build companies and we know what it takes to raise capital.
2. We strive to be responsive to entrepreneurs with quick decisions
3. We're investing our own money
4. We're willing to invest small amounts of money -- anywhere between 10,000 and 250,000. We don't need to invest at least $2,000,000 or own at least 20% of a company. You'll hear this from vcs.
5. We're comfortable taking risk and even supporting the occasional flier. We don't have to justify our thinking to LPs.

Comments

[N. Oke]

This sounds like a great underserved segment for you guys to focus on. And I especially agree with #5 - it's nice not to be accountable to someone else.

Norman

[Mike]

Cool, I still feel like bootstrapping has been so effective that I've never really needed investor money to be successful.

However, I suppose there might be once in a great while where this type of personal buy-in would be appropriate. Afterall, there are a lot of smaller scale things that see returns on a scale that wouldn't be acceptable to a VC firm as a whole, but would be GREAT for a personal investor.