An excellent post from Fred Wilson today on taking investor feedback (which can, indeed, give "feedback whiplash" - as Fred nickname it! - and make you change too often without proper consideration and evidence). My favorite passage is this one:
Investors have their own agenda. They want to invest in "bigger ideas" and "larger outcomes". When they tell you that your idea is too small, they may be talking to themselves, not you. Do not make their problems your problems. This is your business, not theirs.
And to this I would like to add that you usually have only one company, while they have a portfolio. You have to decide for yourself if you want to aim out of the ballpark or if other strategies can give you a more comfortable risk/reward profile. Being the CEO of a nano-sized (now micro, maybe - we are a total of 7 FTEs now across Norway and Romania) for four years, I know my answer so far has been to play it just a tad more safe and being profitable every year since the start.
That being said, we are likely going to work on making TapBookAuthor.com more "venture worthy" ourself this autumn, with a month in a tech incubator in Palo Alto as part of the cure.
Preparing for a whiplash.
