On the Fundraising Trail: Silicon Valley Here I Come

This week just gone has produced some mixed results; mostly positive. Any result at all during a holiday week (it was Thanksgiving on Thursday here in the States) is something to be proud of.

The most exciting news for the week was to see MySchoolAct move into the top 10 stage of its Australian competition. As noted in a recent post, entries for acts are now closed and the exciting news is that we exceeded our target number of acts. I’m also very pleased with the number of registered fans we have – the number by far exceeded my expectations.

During the week I confirmed my meeting with Craig (my angel investor contact mentioned in last weeks post). Flights are now booked, so Silicon Valley here I come.

Before I move on to the remainder of my news, I thought it might be a nice touch to expand on the term “Silicon Valley”.

Silicon Valley is the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, United States (click on the map below and you will be taken to Google maps).

The term originally referred to the region’s large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading high-tech hub because of its large number of cutting-edge entrepreneurs, engineers and venture capitalists. Geographically, Silicon Valley encompasses the northern part of the Santa Clara Valley and adjacent communities. (source: Wikipidia)

And so, back to my news for the week. During the week, I received another knock back from a VC. On this occasion, the VC was Mark Davis of DFJ Gotham. My expectations with Mark weren’t high; after all I approached Mark without a recommendation (I simply cold emailed him through his blog Venture Capital Made Transparent). Looking through DJGotham’s portfolio I did feel that the MySchoolAct business model was a good fit. DJ Gotham do seem to finance companies that generate money rather than companies that are purely in business to be bought out by Google or other internet juggernauts. But in the end, a hit-driven business (let’s face it, that’s what MySchoolAct appears to be from an outsider) was not for Mark.

So this leaves me with 7 days to work on Fundraising within the US before heading back to Sydney to watch the MySchoolAct grand final performance.