Some Advice for IoT Startups Regarding Big Data

Data Collected from IoT Startups

In the United States, QR Code adoption is not nearly as high as it is in Asia.  In terms of IoT, there has been and continues to be an explosion of wearables.  IoT startups using those wearables to create a larger data set about human health.  So there have been a lot of data on ways to be able to count the steps, the heartbeats, and things like that to ultimately create interesting data sets.

What to do with Data Sets

What we at Cultivation Capital struggle with as an investment group is companies believing that they’ll collect whatever data set and it will be where all the value will be driven by the company.  But a lot of times they won’t be able to gather more data.  Or be more effective than big companies like Google or Facebook.  So I think it is very important to differentiate and understand how this can serve a specific segment.  Instead of just thinking that it will be valuable one day and be able to sell it for lots of money.

Creating Real Revenue Traction

Venture Capital firms like to take the least amount of risk possible.  The more traction a company can have the more groups that are interested in investing in them.  I think sometimes it can get frustrating for the entrepreneurs.  They might be thinking too big and they start to realize the difficulties in generating investment interest.  So the future you can get with developing the product and making it closer to real revenue traction, I think the more interest you will get from the financing markets.