Before Funding - Sanjay Anandram, JumpStart Ventures -- Cash is King -- Activities have to be thought out from the ground up, not from a top-down approach: you have to figure out, what will it take to get my first customer, who is willing to pay. And then the next and the next. How many people will I need to hire, how many prospects do I need to meet, to satisfy that customer what kind of technology do I need to have built in? Look at a 12 months cycle - what are the activities, resources, and time for output that I expect to achieve, and at the end of some time limit, what are the so called "Fundable events". What would I have achieved at the end of all of these milestones, such that if an external person were to look at my company, he or she would say that you have you have made progress. Progress is from the standpoint of actual business output. -- There's a startup that said that they've used Rs. 2 crores, and then at the end of 8 months they come back for more cash. They say they've been ISO certified, have an operations manual, lovely office, have trained my people. All of that is not a business end, and these are not fundable events. -- The single most important thing that people look for, is the cashflow. If you're running out of cash in Q4, you'd better start hitting the fundraising trail…
