Your Ideas to Help Us Avert the Innovation Crisis

We’re having a quarterly strategy meeting tomorrow in SF (not really offsite but we still call it that). Our team will be meeting to cover topics that revolve around events and activities in the coming year, and what True needs to do to provide better products and services to our customer, the entrepreneur.

Our customers include existing portfolio CEOs and Founders, new prospective Founders, but importantly, our customers extend beyond our family to include all entrepreneurs contemplating starting or in the early stages of starting their own company. We’ve got a full agenda and lots of stuff working, but we’d like your ideas and feedback.

Now more than ever, the early stage needs to be robust. Let’s face it: this is a dark and dangerous time for innovation. The macro-economic meltdown is bad, and even worse, it has the potential to start a devastating innovation crisis. Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay, Google have RIF’d incredibly talented people. Pfizer recently laid off researchers and startups are prioritizing survival. Mainstream VC has grown large over the past decade, and now mostly emphasizes risk mitigation and bigger deals, exactly at a time when startups are capital efficient and money needs to back very risky endeavors.

We need lots of startups funded today because these are the companies will fuel our recovery and growth over the next 5-10 years. When the meltdown of 2007-2010 begins to ease, IT companies of all shapes and sizes will be on the lookout for promising young companies to fill gaps in product lines of fuel growth. We need to foster a climate where the most talented are encouraged to take the leap and start a project today, or are emboldened to innovate in their garage.

All of us can help in our own way, but at True we feel like we have a particularly powerful platform to address this issue, create more opportunity for entrepreneurs everywhere, and build a stronger set of resources along the way.

Let us know what’s missing in the environment that could help entrepreneurs. What products and services can we provide? What elements of the early stage ecosystem aren’t functioning well?

Please comment below or send your ideas to ideas at trueventures dot com and we’ll incorporate them into our discussion tomorrow.

Thank you.