The fear of being an entrepreneur if you don't have a great idea is our biggest handicap. Everyone thinks they need to have everything ironed out before they can leave their "career". If more people just started viewing entrepreneurship as a career path of its own (as it is), a lot more cool products and business models would be invented.
I definitely agree with the notion "Team first, Idea second". Good ideas are easy; execution is the hard part. Put together a good team, and good ideas will come -- the support for this is the existence of many serial entrepreneurs.
I get the point you're trying to make but that's not exactly true. For every legacy candidate they admit, they must reject exactly 1 qualified candidate as a result.
For every candidate they accept in general, they must reject 8 others.
This argument makes sense, but aren't many large PE shops and Hedge Funds (which either acquire large companies whole, or make many small investments in thousands of companies) a counter example to this? Many have $5B+ valuations, often limited intentionally by a desire not to expand beyond 40-50 investment professionals.
Seems like there is no inherent law preventing a portfolio manager from becoming bigger than any single item in his portfolio.
Sorry to disappoint, but this is not from Mint - it's actually my team's presentation for the Stanford West Coast Venture Case Competition when I was an undergrad at Berkeley (I am Victor, listed on the first slide).
It's a funny story but we won the competition with this presentation, in part because Shasta Ventures, one of the judges there, happened to actually be funding the company (which they announced 3 days after we pitched it). For the questions regarding the financials, I don't know how closely they match reality but we were told by the judges that we won in part because the numbers were conservative/realistic and were in the same ballpark as their own figures.
