When to Start Looking for Investment?

This article is written by Nardine B. M’barek, a Contributor Author at Startup Turkey.

Murat Kansu is the General Manager of Microsoft in Turkey; he is responsible for leading Microsoft in this region. He joined Microsoft in 2003 as Server and Tools Group Lead for Microsoft Middle East and Africa (MEA), and has gone on to serve as Director of Business Operations in Microsoft MEA, Enterprise Customer Sales Director, MEA Emerging Markets and acting Country Manager of Microsoft Kenya.

Mr. Murat Kansu has 20 years of experience in the domain of IT, Prior to joining Microsoft, he lead the HP worldwide financial services marketing team, responsible for market segmentation, solution creation, and positioning and go-to-market strategies. He joined us during Startup Turkey 2016 as a guest and delivered a speech entitled ‘Entrepreneurship that lasts’.

Mr. Kansu wanted to share with our audience the insights of Microsoft, what they are learning, and how the can help the new startups in this big ecosystem. During 2016, Microsoft was working with more than 200 thousand startups around the world; 1.500 of these startups are based in Turkey. During this long period of acquiring experience while working with startups, Microsoft noticed many successful companies, as well as a lot of failures that did not go well. That is why Mr. Kansu wanted to share some of Microsoft’s findings and experiences during Startup Turkey 2016. 

It is somehow similar to sharing the best practices of others that will make of you a successful entrepreneur from Microsoft point of view. 

Microsoft sees being successful as an entrepreneur in the startup world as a circle, that is why they call it the ‘Interconnected Ambitions’. According to them, one of the biggest failures as startups is that as soon as they are established, they start trying to find investors, they start going after Venture Capitalists and government agencies who are spending money on startups.

Mr. Kansu believes that this practice is one of the biggest mistakes to make at the beginning, and as soon as you have established your company before even working on developing your product so that it can meet the market’s, that you want to attract expectations. The core here is to make sure that your product is valuable enough and meet your customers’ needs and expectations, before starting going after Venture Capitalists and investors. The issue in looking for investment at an early stage is that the early you start doing it, the more decentralized and defocused you are going to be when it comes to developing a better product and offering something worth your customers’ money; which is your core responsibility and your main idea. 

Some of the investors are actually falling into this trap since they find themselves in a competition with other startups who are presenting everything they have while trying to show their best, that is why entrepreneurs usually start looking for funs at an early stage to prove to others that their product, like the others’ products, is also a great and innovative idea, while forgetting that quick and rushed decisions such as this one could lead to some noticeable and huge failures later on. 

Once you have a great product that is worth your clients’ money, then you can try and look for investors and funding from big companies such as Microsoft. This is the best way to do it since investors will not help you if your product is not developed enough to meet everyone’s expectations.

https://vimeo.com/157717669