I’ve been meaning to post about Alyssa Royse’s Start Her Up: For Women Entrepreneurs blog for a while now. She writes what they call a P-I Reader Blog on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer site seattlepi.com, and she’s caught my eye several times.
Her latest post, “Can I Have Some of That $700 Billion Please,” would have me laughing out loud if it weren’t for the part of it that is just too true to laugh. [Warning: politics! There are politics in this one.] She comments on one line in particular in President Bush’s speech from last week, about the bailout:
The line that stung me the most: He discussed “massive amounts of money” that flowed into the United States and allowed more entrepreneurs to get money to fund new companies. I can’t really argue the truth or untruth of the statement (though I know plenty of people who run businesses that lost foreign investment money due to anti-terrorism restrictions and FISA making it too hard to do business, even for legitimate businesses), but I can tell you that the last thing anyone with a startup wants to hear is that there are massive amounts of money floating around, because most of us don’t know anyone who’s getting any.
She goes on, after the politics, with some real comments about startups in times of crisis, with four points (I’ve just got the main points here, she has the explanations) for entrepreneurs trying to raise money today:
1. Good luck!
2. What are you going to do with the money, anyway?
3. Ask for help.
4. Remember why you started this company in the first place. Then ask yourself if you still care. Bad times are also a good time to check in with your “belly voice.”
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
