
A couple of months ago, OpenFund was founded by the Greek OpenCoffee organizers. What is OpenFund? As its name states, it is a fund willing to help newly formed startups to develop by giving them a seed capital as well as providing top quality advisors.
George Tziralis, one of OpenFund’s initiators, recently twitted that “Openfund’s main offering is not money”. In my eyes, this is wrong. Don’t get me misunderstood, I believe that their team of advisors is great and that it can help many ideas turn into kick-ass companies. But, their biggest advantage is the money they are offering.
Advisors will give you solutions in current problems. Advisors will make suggestions on how to develop your company. Advisors will probably introduce you to people who think out of the box, who are able to tell you a totally different opinion about your service. Advisors may even save you from some difficult situations, even bankruptcy. To make a long story short, advisors are very helpful only when there is a business model, a product and not just an idea.
And what is necessary for an idea to evolve into a product? Yeap, you guessed right, money. You need money to get someone to build even the simplest thing for you. You need money to pay your host. You need money to rent some office space. Even if you work all by yourself, you need money to buy some food. Maybe in the beginning all these sound “too much” but how far do you believe is that situation?
To sum up, in my opinion, money are much more important than advisors, especially when we are talking about seed fund. Because getting top level advisors is difficult but getting top level advisors without having any money is pretty pointless.
[photo via flickr.com, user jovian]