John dimmer was the president of free range media in 1994. It
was gone under IPO and was a successful business. He is also in airstream
business. He is currently dealing the automobile business, but is looking into
manufacturing trailers too. He is also
thinking of cornering the NW market in airstream dealership. On the other hand
he is an entrepreneur on campus for the University of Oregon. He is also in the
first stage of three-stage angel circles.
The best advice he gave us was to follow your passion and money
will follow. It is very simple advice, but he proved it to us through is
presentation. He talked about funding rounds such as self, friend, family, crowd-sourcing,
angel, venture capital and IPO. He
mentioned that crowd-sourcing is one of the newer phenomena and the laws are
very vague. The crowd-sourcing is best
for the early stages of a company start-up.
The indigogo is one of the examples of crowd-sourcing.
Next he talked about four different types of funding: debt,
equity, hybrid and other. The debt is
the fund raised through borrowing from commercial sources, banks, SBA, private
sources relatives and investors. The equity is raised by selling an ownership
interest in your business. The hybrid is
debt or preferred securities convertible into equity. The other is the sources
that do not qualify as debt or equity. Those are prize money from business plan
competitions, government grants, money available under veterans’ programs,
crowd-sourcing etc.
He also gave us three fundraising strategies: one was to
pitch to groups rather than individuals. That is because it is much more efficient.
Second advice was to target groups that are per-disposed to your business. In a sense, that they have specific business
interest and/or demographic per-disposition. Third, only raise as much money as
you need as equity is expensive to sell. In other words only fund yourself until
the next major milestone is reached and the valuation is bumped up.
