I went to a "captical cafe" held by 365ju.com (聚网) last week. It's the first time I participate in this kind event. The host brought 8 invest companies and around 8 projects (including us, chinesetime.cn) who are seeking for investment. Everything seemed interesting to me. We knew looking for investment was a tricky thing, didn't expect it could be funny as well.
The first one we met was a young pretty woman from a japanese vc company, apparently she didn't know anything about us even we sent ouor BP in advance. That's ok, my partner introduced our project from the beginning, and I was trying to set up the laptop to show her our online school. But the internet connection sucked and we had to gave up. After a few quick symbolic questions, she left. We were just sitting there by ourselves for about half an hour.
The second vc we were introduced to did a good research as he personally is interested in education industry. He was very nice and showed great interest. He did give us reaonable advices. Then told us we were at the early stage and should do more thing to prove our businss modle is sucessful and easy to expand. In the middle of the conversation, the host took me to meet another vc who invested in education industry before. It was a young big girl, she looked so junior that the way she talked is like a child pretend to be an adult. We exchanged the namecards then she continued to talk with somebody else. After that we repeated explaining our project to other vcs. They all asked us very smart questions, but no answers.
By the time everybody was about to leave, a guy looked like a tipical new money jumped into the converstaion and gave us a long speech, the idea was the same --- try to make money first, "survive first, then try to live better" in his word, then vcs will kiss your ass. At the end, I fell into a catch 22:
1. I need to make money to get investment
2. I need investment to make money
Which comes first?
Not sure if those vcs are happy, not sure if people came to look up opportunities are happy, I bet 365ju.com must be happy.