By Rob Lewis
MetaLab’s Andrew Wilkinson announced yesterday that his Victoria, BC-based interface design agency is now offering “Design Capital” to people with great ideas.
What’s Design Capital? It’s different from venture capital, for starters.
“It isn’t about money, it’s about execution and ideas. We see too many smart entrepreneurs obsessing over securing massive investments and primping their advisory board instead of executing.”
Tim O’Reilly puts it best: “You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car—you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road—but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations.”
And Wilkinson (pictured) knows a bit about not making securing venture capital the goal.
MetaLab’s second product Flow—a new simple tool for managing and delegating tasks—was “bringing in over $500,000 in recurring revenue and growing like crazy” after one year of bootstrapping.
There’s a big difference between money and ideas. Money buys desks and pays salaries. Ideas buy you evangelical customers and set you apart from the crowd. We’ve built an amazing company around our ideas, and now we want to help others do the same. With our consulting work, we’ve helped hundreds of great companies build amazing products and services, but we’ve gotten big. Most small startups—the people we built our business around six years ago—can no longer afford us.
Wilkinson wants to give entrepreneurs rocket fuel for great ideas, help them execute better, and build profitable real-world businesses.
So if you’re willing to bypass a big cheque in favor of MetaLab’s experience building simple, useful, and profitable web-based software and services, you should check Design Capital out.
MetaLab doesn’t promise to be make a lot of investments—probably only a couple per year—but they are looking for people with great ideas that are in it for the long haul. Victoria-based MediaCore and Kiind are listed as MetaLab’s first two design capital investments.
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