{"id":349,"date":"2009-02-12T18:35:59","date_gmt":"2009-02-12T17:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=349"},"modified":"2009-02-12T18:35:59","modified_gmt":"2009-02-12T17:35:59","slug":"the-rules-open-source-startup-funding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2009\/02\/12\/the-rules-open-source-startup-funding\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rules: Open Source Startup Funding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Cuban&#8217;s blog is an odd one; I really can&#8217;t remember why I started reading it (presumably linked by a VC blogger would be my guess), and yet even though I read very few blogs I&#8217;ve stuck with his. It&#8217;s not like the standard SiValley other investor\/commentator blogs. It&#8217;s a lot more based in the real world, and a lot closer to my experiences of running the business side of a business as opposed to the &#8220;building to flip&#8221; side of running a startup without ever being profitable just to sell it to someone else.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, advert over. He&#8217;s posted <a href=\"http:\/\/blogmaverick.com\/2009\/02\/09\/the-mark-cuban-stimulus-plan-open-source-funding\/\">an interesting challenge: want money for a startup? Right. You have to publish the entire business plan, and let everyone else copy it.<\/a> If &#8211; as many people are fond of saying &#8211; it&#8217;s implementation that matters, not the idea, then this shouldn&#8217;t be a problem for you. But it may bring wider-world benefits to everyone else, intangible virtuous-circle stuff.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI will invest money in businesses presented here on this blog. No minimum, no maximum, but a very specific set of rules. Here they are:<\/p>\n<p>1. It can be an existing business or a start up.<br \/>\n2. It can not be a business that generates any revenue from advertising. Why ? Because I want this to be a business where you sell something and get paid for it. Thats the only way to get and stay profitable in such a short period of time.<br \/>\n3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days<br \/>\n4. It must be profitable within 90 days.<br \/>\n5. Funding will be on a monthly basis. If you dont make your numbers, the funding stops<br \/>\n6. You must demonstrate as part of your plan that you sell your product or service for more than what it costs you to produce, fully encumbered<br \/>\n7. Everyone must work. The organization is completely flat. There are no employees reporting to managers. There is the founder\/owners and everyone else<br \/>\n8.  You must post your business plan here, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and\/or download<br \/>\n9. I make no promises that if your business is profitable, that I will invest more money. Once you get the initial funding you are on your own<br \/>\n10. I will make no promises that I will be available to offer help. If I want to , I will. If not, I wont.<br \/>\n11. If you do get money, it goes into a bank that I specify, and I have the ability to watch the funds flow and the opportunity to require that I cosign any outflows.<br \/>\n12. In your business plan , make sure to specify how much equity I will receive or how I will get a return on my money.<br \/>\n13. No mult-level marketing programs (added 2\/10\/09 1pm)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>PS: I love Mark&#8217;s attitude that comes across in his blog. E.g. in one of the first comments to this blog post:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nWould you be open to reviewing pitches on your blog and then details privately?<\/p>\n<p>From MC> No. This is an open source opportunity. Not a pitch Mark opportunity\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Cuban&#8217;s blog is an odd one; I really can&#8217;t remember why I started reading it (presumably linked by a VC blogger would be my guess), and yet even though I read very few blogs I&#8217;ve stuck with his. It&#8217;s not like the standard SiValley other investor\/commentator blogs. It&#8217;s a lot more based in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,29,50,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}