Or, you can start showing up at cool hacker spaces like the Hacker Dojo or Noise Bridge.
Get a stack of business cards, and hang out at Hackers & Founders </shameless plug> or 106 miles and make a point of having coffee with a couple of cool new people every week.
Join one of the dozens of cool co working spaces in the area. (Avoid Plug and Play).
Spend $9 on the "Pitching hacks" ebook. Best money you'll spend as a founder.
Work on building:
team with at least one technical founder
workable product
refined pitch
gain some traction
preferably find one or two people to be your advisors (aka social proof)
And then apply to Angel list.
You need demo day for "social proof" in front of investors and to get a press bump. Demo days aren't essential for funding any more now that Angel List has turned funding into an API.
There's an open ecosystem in place for this, and it's improving. There are still a number of places in the early stage ecosystem that really suck, however. And, that's why incubators are still able to charge 6% of your equity for fixes to that.
But, some of us are working on fixing these problems. You'll be hearing more from Hackers & Founders about this in the near future.
At Hacker Dojo, I'm running a very small in-person solo-founder's support group. Yes, it's like an A.A. meeting, but for solo-founders. Going at it alone is well, lonely, as anyone who's done it can attest. But solo founders can support each other. Email me for details.
And if you're looking for a co-founder in Silicon Valley, I recommend FoundersHookup.com. In the valley, there's an overabundance of business people with just an idea who are "just looking for an engineer". With FoundersHookup, biz folks are thoroughly screened first (and charged). Free for developers. As a technical founder myself, I do believe that if you can find the right biz cofounder, you'd may just never do another startup without the right biz cofounder first. I didn't use to think this way. (note: you could also find a technical cofounder at FH)
I've been to a lot the H&F events and other events in the Bay Area. They're great, but they do not empower the individual groups. They're good at getting speakers and creating a forum to get to know each other. With YCreject.com, I want to complement those efforts and take those organized groups to the next level. YC does a good job at putting their companies on a pedestal and tell the world to "look at us". Given this small grassroots project over the upcoming summer, I'd like to take 5 groups and place them on a similar pedestal so that investors and the press can see who they are and foam at the mouth.
It's all about incentives. Plug and Play's business model is people paying for office space. So, they take anybody who comes and is willing to pay their prices for real estate, and they try to call investors in so that the people paying for office space can present to them.
Investors want to see a bunch of qualified, filtered startups. So, the incubators/accelerators that provide "good deal flow" for the investors have the best reputations with the investment community. Plug and Play doesn't provide that.
Get a stack of business cards, and hang out at Hackers & Founders </shameless plug> or 106 miles and make a point of having coffee with a couple of cool new people every week.
Join one of the dozens of cool co working spaces in the area. (Avoid Plug and Play).
Spend $9 on the "Pitching hacks" ebook. Best money you'll spend as a founder.
Work on building:
And then apply to Angel list.You need demo day for "social proof" in front of investors and to get a press bump. Demo days aren't essential for funding any more now that Angel List has turned funding into an API.
There's an open ecosystem in place for this, and it's improving. There are still a number of places in the early stage ecosystem that really suck, however. And, that's why incubators are still able to charge 6% of your equity for fixes to that.
But, some of us are working on fixing these problems. You'll be hearing more from Hackers & Founders about this in the near future.