This is a guest post by Getaround cofounder Jessica Scorpio

When my co-founders and I founded Getaround at Singularity University back in 2009, we believed we were on to something big. People we knew experienced that clear “a-ha moment” when we explained how sharing cars with people nearby could help fight the problem of car overpopulation.

What concerned us, however, was that we kept hearing reasons why it wouldn’t work. People were concerned with the risks — insurance, fears around sharing a car with a stranger — they asked, how would we ever convince investors to share the risk with us?

We spent the next year working to build our technology. During that time we also addressed the primary risks by passing car sharing legislation in the State of California, and securing a primary insurance policy through Berkshire- Hathaway. With all the pieces in place, it was time to seek funding.

By August 2012, we had a raised a $3.4 million seed round, and announced a $13.9 million first round led by Menlo Ventures and other amazing investors like Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher and Innovation Endeavors.

We have been fortunate to have raised great rounds, from amazing investors — but fundraising was one of the most stressful events of my life. Despite having seasoned entrepreneurs on our team, none of us had ever raised funds before.

I recently spoke about early stage funding at Startup Grind in Mountain View. Here are the funding tips I shared with the audience:

Pick your launch pad

Today, there are countless platforms to launch your business. Before you choose a conference, hackathon or accelerator program, consider this time and space as a launch pad for your business and an important step in your funding endeavors.

Given the connection, many of our first investors were also from Singularity. That initial investment allowed us to found the company and turn our big idea into something real. From there, we spent the next bootstrapping with angel funds, solving major problems that stood in our way, and building our product to get ready for our official launch.

Raise on a high point

After our year of bootstrapping, we made our big debut on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011. At that time, we had already closed over 80 percent of our seed round and our Tech Crunch win definitely helped secure a few key investors to close out the round.

Raising funds on a high note, like a product launch or major award or recognition, can help you capitalize on your momentum in a real way and helps to create a sense of urgency among potential investors, which is never a bad thing.

Choose the best cheerleaders

Late in 2011, we started raising our first round. We already knew who we wanted to meet with with, and headed straight into coffee meetings and official pitches. And we did that all day, everyday, for three months. Those months of hard work ended with our team, sitting around a table, surrounded by term sheets — and totally stressed.

Choosing your investors is like choosing a life partner — it’s a huge commitment and it’s fine to be very picky. In the end, we chose investors who were passionate about the same goals we are. We also looked for investors who could bring experience, patience, and are supportive of the founders.

At the end of the day, raising funds is a stressful, but necessary part of being an entrepreneur. You and your co-founders are going kill yourself trying to make it happen, you’re not going to sleep, and you’re definitely not going to get any other work done.

Plant your seeds properly, strike while the iron’s hot, surround yourself by great people, and you’ll get it done.

Jessica Scorpio is a founder and Director of Marketing at Getaround, a peer-to-peer carsharing company.

Scorpio previously founded IDEAL, a not-for-profit network for entrepreneurs and young leaders.

photo credit: Jonno Witts via photopin cc

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In the past, angel investors have been multi-millionaires, even billionaires. They are classified as “sophisticated” or “experienced,” primarily because they can afford to pour $25,00o, $50,000 or more into over a dozen early-stage startups.

To succeed at the high-stakes, low-odds investment game, you’ll need a diverse portfolio of high-calibre companies.

The first-of-its-kind partnership

This month, SecondMarket and Angellist announced a partnership that lets accredited investors fund startups for small dollar amounts, as low as $1000. They have just completed the first trial.

“Entrepreneurs can now get access to more sources of capital, and there are more people with a vested, financial interest in seeing them succeed,” said Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, a network and subscriber-base of angel investors.

The trial

“But the product itself is being tested,” Ravikant admitted. For this reason both AngelList and SecondMarket only invited 10 percent of their network to participate. These users were chosen at random.

The pair decided to raise $150,000 for a hot biotech startup, which had also already received funding from some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms.

The startup is on the cusp of closing $1 million in its first round. Its founders will benefit from this vast pool of investors from a marketing standpoint, but will not have to contend with multiple shareholders.

“The investors become grass roots advocates for the company,” Jeremy Smith, SecondMarket’s CSO, told me. “This could be tremendously beneficial for technology startups.”

Note that the barriers to entry will not be dropped in 2013. Next year, non-accredited investors are given the opportunity to fund private companies in exchange for equity. ”It changes everything,” said Smith. “But we are not sure this is a space we should be playing. Let’s focus on accredited investors [as] there is enough need.”

The challenges?

Ravikant told me the first problem was the amorphous timing, made more complicated when the startup succeeded in raising an additional $200,000 in funds from an external source.

“We are learning from this experiment,” said Ravikant. “We are redoing the interface and running it again for a couple more companies.”

The model is innovative when applied to tech startups (it’s not all that different to feeder fund structures), so it was not clear from the incipient stages whether it would work.

So, the results are in. It did not go by without a hitch: they had to consistently delay the funding deadline, the amount was lowered from $5,000 to $1,000, and the process of on-boarding investors was far from seamless. To qualify, investors had to sign up to both SecondMarket and Angellist, and both require a rigorous evaluation process.

But it worked. And this will fundamentally change the rules of the investment game in Silicon Valley.

This story was updated with comments from both SecondMarket and AngelList

Hurricane Sandy is bearing down on the Eastern Seaboard as I write this. It’s got New York City right in front of it.

The National Weather Service is forecasting torrential rains, power outages, and widespread flooding. The storm will pick up this evening, and vent with full fury beginning tomorrow morning. The New York City transit is preparing to shut down.

Here’s why “Frankenstorm,” as residents are calling it, is not flustering New York City’s tech entrepreneurs.

In the past, extreme weather conditions like these have halted business: Mom-and-Pop stores close their doors, and large corporations issue warnings to employees to stay at home. However, through the adoption of cloud-based management systems, social enterprise tools and robust servers, tech founders are finding ways to surge ahead.

The vibe in the city is a mixture of anxious and couldn’t-care-less,” said Kathryn Minshew, cofounder of the digital media startup geared toward professional women, The Daily Muse. “A lot of people who’d previously experienced Hurricane Irene were very lackadaisical up until today, but are now starting to take this more seriously.”

With competitors down, it’s a boost in business

For H.Bloom, the flower delivery startup, these “fire drills” as cofounder Sonu Panda refers to hurricanes Irene and Sandy, are par for the course.

Panda (on the right, featured with cofounder Bryan Burkhart), who is currently in Manhattan preparing the disaster plan, needs to balance safety with the company’s customer satisfaction guarantee.

“We’re not a digital media startup where everyone can just work from home until the whole thing blows over,” he said. Although many of the operations staff will remain at home, for those that are engaged in the processing, design, loading and delivery of the flowers, it’s business as usual.

By leveraging the latest cloud-based, geo-location technologies to monitor the weather and the movement of trucks up and down the coast, the company will continue to deliver for as long as it can, far surpassing expectations. If a shipment of flowers cannot be delivered, its customer relationship management (CRM) system will automatically notify customers to expect a delay.

“During Hurricane Irene, we were delivering when the U.S. postal service was shut down,” said Panda.

If anything, the storm is a marketing boost for the startup, and an opportunity to showcase its technological prowess.

Hooray! More time to code

For small teams, it’s an opportunity to hunker down and devote time to product. “We’re using this time to sneak in a few extra hours of productivity when no-one is looking,” said cofounder Jana Trantow of JoinFun.

For companies based in Brooklyn, an evacuation zone, technical types are already congregating in the nearest safe haven.

“Three of our engineers live together and plan to work for the next three days, iterating on any feedback we receive,” said Reuben Doetsch, cofounder of Brooklyn-based startup, Sportaneous. To prepare for the storm, Doetsh told me he bought them all the essentials: “bedding, flashlights, and a generator so we can still code.”

With face-to-face meetings cancelled, entrepreneurs view this as an opportunity to get things done.

“We actually built our office to be a lot like an apartment, so myself and a few others are crashing there for a couple of days,” recalled Jason L. Baptiste, CEO of New York startup, OnSwipe. “I see the hurricane as an opportunity to be heads down and get a lot of work done over the next couple of days.”

In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, a handful of startups went the extra mile by opening offices in perpetually sunny locations. ZocDoc, the New York-based health tech company, opened an office in Pheonix to be geographically isolated and avoid power disruptions.

They have a “business as usual” disaster plan

Not ready to open a second office on the West Coast? New York’s most well-prepared entrepreneurs from startups like Mirror, a Flatiron-based social discovery tool, Tip or Skip, the mobile shopping game, and OMG Foodie shared their finely-tuned disaster relief plans:

• Re-route servers: According to reports, power outages are to be expected! For the tech entrepreneurs that have experienced those dreaded Amazon outages (last week, Reddit, Foursquare and others were down last week due to a performance problem in Northern Virginia), it’s always a smart contingency plan to roll over servers to the West Coast. “That way, at the very least, you’ll have a web presence,” said Doetsch.
• Set guidelines for work at home.  “Productivity matters at every business, especially startups.  If our team has power, they will be working,” said Daniel Mattio, cofounder of Mirror. Mattio plans to remain in the office during the storm to coordinate workflow — he told me that during Hurricane Irene, he communicated with his Pennsylvania-based CTO on Skype (“I was watching his hotel room service get delivered while Irene was raging in the background on my end”) and asked for updates from the staff via GroupMe every three hours.
• Charge your devices and buy a few generators: “We hope to utilize backup generators and tether off our phone as a worse case scenario,” said Gary Reloj, CEO of OMG Foodie. ”I’m home charging every single device I have,” added Julie Fredrickson, CEO of Manhattan-based PlayAPI, who emailed me while stuck on a checkout line at Whole Foods.
• Stock up on food! ”Myself, I’ve stocked up on gallons of water, Korean ramen, and Mac & Cheese,” Reloj advised. The team is finalizing its three-day work plan at the office with a hard-stop at 5pm to ensure that everyone can get home before the MTA shuts down at 7pm ET. Just hours ago, the office of the Manhattan Borough President issued a warning to New Yorkers to purchase plenty of bottled water, granola bars, medications, a first-aid kit, pet care, child care, and other non-perishable food stuffs. Not a native New Yorker? Expect the unexpected. Peter Shankman, founder of HARO, made a food-run to ensure his staff wouldn’t starve. “I’m prepared for Sandy doesn’t mean I have take-out menus. Go shopping tonight and give the delivery guys a break so they don’t have to deliver tomorrow in a hurricane,” he said.

Cancelled tech events

• The Google Android Kick-off Event: As we reported this weekend, Google had planned Monday’s event in an evacuation zone. Learn more here.
• D: Dive Into Mobile: The conference, organized by tech blog AllThingsD, has been postponed until further notice. The conference hotel, the Ritz Carlton, is giving full refunds and waiving cancellation fees.
• The Big Apple Smackdown: VentureBeat’s own Ping Pong and networking event has also been cancelled until the storm blows over.

New Yorkers, you are nothing if not resilient!

We are updating this list as we learn more. 

Top image via Shutterstock