There is really nothing like free advice..

What I mean by this is the following.

Right now you might be struggling with something. Your startup, your thesis, your project, whatever.

Have you thought of all the experts in the world that can help you? They are all at the distance of an email. All the entrepreneurs, all the scientists, all the teachers in the world. It might take just one email to change what you’re doing to be something awesome. Why not take the action?

After the audience suggested that a venture capital firm was necessary in his talk at Take Off 2008, MV started SeedCapital.pt.

SeedCapital has now started to receive submissions and the number of received projects has been quite low.

I know there is a lot of people with potential in Portugal that would like to start their own startup. Here are some things you might not know:

1/ You don’t need to live in Lisbon or even want to live there.

2/ You don’t need to be unemployed ou self-employed. You don’t even need to leave your current job. If you’re working it is very likely you can obtain permission to work on a personal project on your free time, as long as your project doesn’t pose itself as competition.

3/ If you think “I don’t have enough knowledge, if I’m the right person, if I’m bright enough”, join the club, you’re not the only one. In Portugal we suffer a lot from this. No one ever suffered from excess of confidence, so turn yourself to the other extreme. You’ll maybe have more people calling you arrogant, but at least you won’t be insecure anymore. And you can’t do stuff without people talking against you, so get over it. And the most important thing is wanting to do, the will to distend the effort necessary.

4/ You’ll never know unless you try. And even if you’re not selected, it doesn’t mean anything. Ideas can only be tested in the long run and after they are put into practice.

5/ You will need someone else if you’re just one person.

I’ve sent a couple of e-mails to some friends I would like to see them applying. One of the things SeedCapital will probably have is a space where all the startups can be working. It won’t be mandatory to be there of course, but if it works I think it would be great to see that happening.

Also some friends are not applying because they are alone. I wonder how we could solve this. Maybe a startup job board where founders could post a summary of their idea and look for co-founders? I don’t know.

You can still submit your project. Something that might be worth listening to is the talk by MV at Take Off 2008:

http://takeoff.ideias3.com/2008/podcasts/mario_valente.mp3

One thing we were taught at Kickstart, while covering finances and accounting, was that getting 1000€ today is not the same as getting 1000€ in a year from now. This seems to be a basic thing you learn while studying economics but we, mere mortals, have difficulty in understanding. So what is the reasoning behind this principle?

1) Inflation: the price of goods and services rises and therefore what we can buy with 1000€ today is not the same as what we’ll be able to buy in a year.*

2) More importantly: even if the inflation was 0%, having 1000€ today is not the same since we can invest the money today and make.. well, more money. Otherwise we’ll have to wait a whole year before investing.

This becomes more obvious when considering more money and a larger span of time. 10.000€ will not have today’s value in 10 years.

I couldn’t find the name behind this principle of Economics but if you know tell us.

* assuming inflation is rising