Rejected...

Since most of my posts seem to be about how smoothly things are going, I figured I'd buck the trend...

Today we heard that we were rejected by the NC Idea grant program. 

If you don't know about NC Idea and are thinking of starting something here, they are worth checking out.  Twice a year they hand out grants of up to $50,000 to help companies that are just getting started.  Since it's a grant you don't have to repay the money or give up equity for it.  Pretty sweet.

The only caveat is that you can't use the money for salaries.  It is supposed to be used for things that help you get venture funding down the road e.g. patent applications.

I have no idea why we didn't make the grade -- unfortunately you don't get feedback on your application.  But for the right kind of company, I think it's a good program.

In other funding related news...  I have no wish to offend any members of the local community, but I am increasingly of the opinion that in the RTP region, new ideas in software (especially web-related) have almost zero chance of being locally funded.  The business community is fantastic for new-comers, but the funding side of things seems dramatically less so...

At this stage we have one local group that is actively following up and has been very supportive (thanks!).

When I look at locally funded early stage ventures, in almost every case the local investor was working along side non-local investors.  In a perfect world, I would prefer to work with local investors so that we can build the local early-stage community.  Unfortunately, I don't think that is going to happen any time soon.

Anyway.  We'll be here having our private pity party and building our kickass product.  I promise to talk more about the big "it" next week.

Comments

[Phillip Rhodes]

Yeah, I've heard that sentiment - that NC doesn't have a good base vis-a-vis startup funding - before, from a few people. I don't understand why that is either... given the same factors that make this such an interesting high-tech area, you'd think it would be a natural place for startups, and would therefore attract the interest of venture capitalists and their ilk. But no.

Go figure, right?

[Scot Wingo]

Maybe it should be called NC (no)Idea?

[DisMonkey]

Trouble-maker ;-)

[Tanner Lovelace]

Back when I worked at a startup, I was talking to the founder one day and his contention was that the VCs in NC were much more interested in funding a tobacco farm than funding a tech startup. Sad to hear it's still pretty much the same. :-(