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04/22/13 | Uncategorized

Investor Comedy Relief: the Missed Investment Opportunity

Best market sizing analysis on earth, via Ali G, for the ice cream glove market analysis.

By Lisa Suennen (Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Psilos Group)

Have you seen Shark Tank? Seriously, who comes up with this stuff? Someone should do a study matching the city of origin of some of the crazier ideas with the number of meth lab arrests in that same locale. I have to believe there is a relationship here; correlation or causality? Who knows?

The fact is, however, that some ideas that sound bat-$%#@ crazy turn out to be good. $4 coffee? What? Are you nuts? Who is going to pay $4 for coffee that you can pay $1 for or make at home, for Godā€™s sake? Hello Starbucks.

So the truth of the matter is that if you are a great investor (and have a little bit of luck) you can distinguish between what is crazy but just might work and what is crazy and should put the entrepreneur in an institutional setting for a minimum 30-day stint.

To that end, Ali G, aka Sacha Baron Cohen, provided one of the worldā€™s funniest examples of this, albeit as parody, when he went around Silicon Valley to pitch the ice cream glove to actual VCs.

A few weeks ago I saw another funny one on Saturday Night Live: comedienne Melissa McCarthy, as Barb Kellner, goes looking for capital for her pizza-eating business, whereby she acts as an outsourced provider for the eating of leftover pizza. She goes to a potential financing source and passionately starts her pitch, to which the investor responds,ā€Iā€™m sorry, you expect us to give you money so you can eat pizza?ā€ She then responds with gusto, ā€œYeah, man!ā€

I love it. A woman CEO, first of all, and one who has the courage of conviction in her idea.

Ā» Read the full post at Venture Valkyrie.

Anne-Gail Moreland

Anne-Gail Moreland

Anne-Gail Moreland, an intern with Women 2.0, was on the StartupBus. She studies neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College, where she is trying to merge a passion for tech and the brain into a new wave of cognition-based technology

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