There Is No Series A Crunch

The Series A Crunch referrers to the fact that while angel-funded startups (think: $750k  invested by angels in two founders) have grown 5x+ in the past three years, the number of Series A fundings (think: $3M invested by a venture capitalist in a 10-person startup) has stayed the same.

I'm telling you right now this is a complete non-issue.

Many folks are obsessing over the supposed "Series A crunch" because, quite logically, if there is a fixed number of Series A investments to go around and a lot more folks fighting for them, well, many folks will not get one.

Parents fleeing a public school system increase the demand for the (relatively) fixed number of slots in private education, making those slots more and more valuable. In fact, it only takes a percentage of actors to "switch teams" to cause an imbalance.

What these folks, largely journalists who have no experience in business, fail to realize is that "things" do not always stay the same in an equation -- and that founders should be wickedly good at adapting to changing conditions.

>> Fact one: the number of Series A fundings could dramatically increase.

The number of slots for players in the NBA this year was 435 (29 teams x 15 players). However, when the NBA started 60 years ago, there were only 11 teams, so the number of slots totaled just 165 (assuming 15-man rosters back then).

In the coming years, the NBA will, mark my word, add a half-dozen teams in Europe and Asia. It's safe to assume there will be a 40-team league some day.

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The Best Hackathon Ever Held

Over 1,000 developers took us up on scholarships to the LAUNCH Festival last week, and many asked us, "Why don't you have a Hackathon?"

Since so many folks have demanded it, we've decided to host a hackathon. But, like all things we do, we want to make it awesome and groundbreaking -- we do live in the "age of excellence" after all.

So, our goal is to host "The best hackathon ever held."

We did some brainstorming, and here is what we came up with:

1. A killer prize: I'm personally putting up a $25k *investment* in the winning project at a $1M valuation -- or $10k in cash. ( Hint: take the investment and let's raise a bigger round on AngelList together!). Going to hit up my friends to put prizes up as well.

2. Exposure: the top five projects will get to the main stage -- a full 10% of the team competing.

3. A prestigious award similar to our LAUNCH 1.0 and LAUNCH 2.0 prizes. The 'LAUNCH Alpha' award will given to the best project from the five that makes the main stage.
 
4. VIP service: Participants can email at any time and get waiter service -- including a 15-minute chair massage (who wants to sponsor that!)

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Moderate Success Is the Enemy of Breakout Success

One of the most important skills of an entrepreneur is being able to gauge one's own performance.

Is the project you're working on a failure or success? How do you know?

Should you persevere, pivot or move on and focus on a new, more promising project?

If your company is a success, is it going to be a billion-dollar success or a $10M 'success’?  

These questions are hard to answer, and they’re particularly hard for entrepreneurs, who are, as we all know, 'unique.'

And yes, by unique I mean bipolar, insane, moody, delusional, crazy, irresponsible and unbalanced -- at least the good ones are!

You see, self-rating is riddled with bias.

The 'illusion of superiority' leads most folks to believe they're better than they actually are. I read that 70% of folks think they are above average, which is statistically not possible.

A study once showed that over 94% of college professors thought they were above average.

Luke Skywalker thought he was a Jedi, and Darth Vader cut his hand off.

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Just added: 1000 more scholarships for the LAUNCH Festival

As part of our mission to "be the most helpful to founders and startups," the LAUNCH Festival gave away 1,000 tickets to developers, designers and UX professionals last week. Demand was so great we've decided to offer another 1,000 scholarships! This will make the LAUNCH Festival the #1 event for people who actually build stuff (i.e., the people many of you want to hire).

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Free Ticket to the LAUNCH Festival

tl;dr: Set goal of LAUNCH Festival being biggest event in tech industry w/5,000+ peeps. Giving scholarships (free tickets) to developers, designers, founders, UX folks. Apply here.

Lawyers, VCs, angels, corporate raiders and rich folks can buy tickets.

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Friends,

The LAUNCH Festival is March 4-6th, 2013, and this is the sixth year I've run the event (the first three as TechCrunch50 and last two as the LAUNCH Festival). I don't need to make a profit on the event, and frankly I'm bored with how easy my life is getting and want to challenge myself. #realtalk

We are already the best place to launch your new startup (1.0 competition) or product (2.0 competition), but we want to go bigger and do more  for the startups who choose our stage over DEMO and TechCrunch Disrupt. The three things startups need are cash, developers and PR. We're the best place to get all three. Hands down. We crush Disrupt and DEMO on these three factors -- but we want to push our event harder!

You see, AOL is making about $2M in profits from Disrupt, and DEMO throws off well over a $1M in profits for IDG by charging the startups up to $20k each to present. We don't have to make any money, so we can do crazy, insane and disruptive things: like give away free tickets to cool people!!! :-)

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