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New Early Stage Financing Options for Entrepreneurs

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Seed-stage means promising companies that don’t yet have a revenue stream, and may not yet have a proof of concept. Since the economic downturn started, neither angels nor VCs have given much attention to startups without a product and a revenue stream. For VCs, early-stage means customer revenue is less than $10M. Super Angels.

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Outside capital: do or die?

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Many other kinds of defenses also allow you to join the venture version of the “slow food” movement: robust intellectual property rights (say, obtained from a university partnership program), exclusive contracts with key suppliers or distributors, a prime physical location. Then you’ll know whether you can safely bypass outside funding.