...we recently spoke with a VC in Boise, Idaho, who gets 500 deals a year. His firm invests in four. That means that less than 1% of the entrepreneurs who apply succeed in getting financed. If you look at the numbers of super angels in Silicon Valley, they are even more scary. Mike Maples told us that he gets 7,000 deals a year and invests in 12 to 15. That’s a 0.21% hit rate. The flip side: a 99.79% rejection rate.
Entrepreneur Commons is catering to the 99% who cannot get help from VCs or Angels, and what we offer is peer-support for entrepreneurs. It scales, and it brings a lot of value of entrepreneurs participating in the regular peer-support meetings. It would make sense for every VC, every Angel Group and every bank to host Entrepreneur Commons meetings so that if they cannot help with funding they can still keep the people within their ecosystem and allow them to grow to the best they can be. All it requires is a room and coffee once a month and it would allow them to switch from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking. We went in 2010 from 2 chapters to 19 chapters around the world, and there is no reason that we cannot grow to hundreds of chapters moving forward - www.entreco.org.
