Fund-raising, serial entrepreneurs and Kaka

Ka-ching !! the sound of money raining in from VCs....
Yesterday, we had a session with Jorge Mata, a successful serial entrepreneur and investor, the man behind My Alerts and Berggi and many more. Jorge gave a talk on raising funds for startups.

The talk was extremely interesting - the topic was money, and how you can raise it, so obviously everyone was interested, and Jorge is a speaker with a flair for the "quotable quotes". And yes, Enrique had put up the twitter list for our class hashtag #ietechstartup, and most of us were tweeting Jorge's comments in realtime.

At the outset, I don't really get the idea behind becoming a 'serial entrepreneur'. I can see why it might appeal to some, but it's not for me. Jorge is a self-proclaimed 'serial entrepreneur'. So while I personally don't agree with this concept, I must say, Jorge's reasoning was very coherent and consistent.

The points that were either new to me, or somehow thought provoking were :-

* It´s very important to relinquish stakes to VCs very carefully
Hand over too much, and even a successful exit would leave you no better off financially.

* a good board is there to protect your investors from you

* Processes are probably more important than platforms/trends
Too many people are thinking about platforms, trying to become the next Facebook or Twitter, and not enough thinking about solving a problem or improving a process

The best part came when a classmate and friend prefaced a question with a blunt statement 'It looks like you're more of a professional fund-raiser than a professional entrepreneur'. Ha ha. I loved it !!
Then again, different perceptions, different definitions. None necessarily better than the other.

OK, how does Kaka fit into this?
Jorge Mata raised as much money in the peak years (´99) as the entire valuation of the MAB today ~ € 60 Mn.
To put that in context, Real Madrid purchased Kaka for about € 65 Mn similar amount !!
Different priorities :)