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By mid-1980s, many Venture Capital Club's investment strategy had evolved to relying on a basket-investment approach to limit risk. The VCC membership would act as an informal cooperative of angel investors each of whom would put some money into approved speculations. The theory being by spreading speculative risk, angels would reduce their losses and increase their odds of success. In fact, this strategy keep Angels involved with VCC longer. However, risk reward ratio eventually ensured that Angels would be losers. By 1990s, High Tech was glamorous and logical focus for these speculative investments. The DotCom Bubble bursting meant that not only did publicly trading DotComs fail, but also almost all of VCC DotComs went under.
In March 2000, I had a mailing list of over three hundred traditional VCCs in United States. Today, my mailing list is less than one hundred. To date, there hasn't been a resurgence of traditional VCC interest in States. Given that Venture Capitalist now fund one business plan in every ten thousand they review and two-thirds of VCCs are no more, entrepreneurs seeking venture capital will find it far harder to find risk capital that they are seeking.
The alternative to traditional venture capital gambling is to follow Venture Capital Profits strategy. At least one VCC, Global Village Investment Club [http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/globalvillageinvestmentclubwelcome/] is doing so. If you plan to wait until Second Coming of VCCs and better odds of a favorable review by Venture Capital firms, you will probably be waiting for decades.
To contact author, email Beowulfinvestments@Earthlink.net
He has been the Managing Director of Beowulf Investments [http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/] since 1981 and is the Executive Director of the Global Village Investment Club [http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/globalvillageinvestmentclubwelcome/]