4 Introduction also be formed at this dine. Despite all these efforts, of every hundred business plans that are submitted to a given venture capital company, only about thirty result in a first meeting, ten receive a more detailed review, and less than one gets funding. In 1989, roughly fifteen hundred companies were funded by venture capital firms. If funding efforts are successful, the founder and his or her core personnel will: start (new company); This is also the point at which additional people leave their jobs to form the nucleus of the new firm. In order for the fledgling organization to become fully operational, the founders must now: get (space, people, product development tools, UNIX license); At this stage, the new company's founders have to acquire the basic tools needed for product development. In the early 1980s, systems companies purchased a VAX, a copy of UNIX, and a license to operate, develop, and sell it as the standard operating system. In the 1990s, a collection of Sun workstations, Apple Macintoshes, or IBM-compatible PCs is likely to substitute for the VAX. Now that the new firm is in business, it proceeds to: sell (product idea);design (product); market&sell&produce (product); The sequence of events-sell, design, and build-is very important. The product development process starts with attempts to sell the product idea to potential customers. This provides critical feedback for the design ( although it can also produce an unbuildable product specification). The founding team typically spends between twelve and twenty-four months developing a product, often making sales agreements with traditional companies that are unable to develop new products in a timely manner. The start-up then begins to market, sell, and produce its product. Marketing, sales, and production are extremely important, since these are the activities that determine the new company’s profitability, which is the subject of the next segment of our high-tech start-up "program": while
wait; get (more $);
sell (new company);
If the new venture does not at first achieve profitability, investors are asked to provide