What ideas do we invest in?

Essentially, we invest in ideas that can become businesses. However, there's a difference between ideas that need money and ideas that investors can exit. Having a loose sense of how investors can eventually sell their shares down the road goes a long way.

A lot of options exist today to raise funds, from websites where you pre-sell a product to entrepreneur competitions. They're designed to get an idea over a hump, but not for a long-term investment. It's important to know what type of financing you're after, and the kind we offer. 

$5,000, in our opinion, is probably less important to your idea than the knowledge and people you need to get it running. We want to get money, knowledge and people around your idea to prove out its viability. Along the way, we become investors because we like the idea, the entrepreneur and the path to exit becomes clear.

When we consider an idea to invest in we ask ourselves:

• Is there a possible path to exit?
• Is the person with the idea the same person to run with it?
• Can we connect the idea with a good resource to help it along?

How does Start Garden choose an idea?

• The business will be bigger than a sole-proprietorship
• It has a goal to scale up from a small business into a big one
• It needs a long-term investment of financial, intellectual and social capital, not a short burst of funds
• It seeks to make a profit. (Meaning, it's not a non-profit organization)
• There's an identifiable way investors will make their money back

Events, bands, films, books and other personal projects do not fall under our "scalable" definition, and are far more suited for a short burst of cash, for which Kickstarter.com works well.

The public endorsement process is designed to let in investments that grow the value of Start Garden's portfolio, but may have been overlooked by the Start Garden team. Start Garden reserves the right to disqualify any publicly endorsed submission that does not fit the criteria stated above.

If you think your idea works, submit it!

Or, learn more about specific rules for submitting