Black Girl Ventures Founder Shelly Bell Explains How Small Businesses Can Qualify For Venture Capital
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What should a business do if they’re not quite ready for venture capital?
“Getting started, for investors, is not ideation,” shared Bell. “So, it’s not necessarily getting started like, ‘Oh, I got an idea and I got a LLC.’ No, no, no, no, no. You’re not gonna be ready. And if you’re not quite ready for VC, you might wanna do incubators, grow your team, focus on building a business that makes money. Not everybody is gonna need venture capital. So you also can look at things like crowdfunding equity, which are platforms like Republic and Start Engine where if you have certain levels of revenues, people can actually give money for small equities. You might just need to go after grants. You might just need to use money from your paycheck. Depending on where you are in your journey, that’s going to dictate which capital you go after.”
