Start-ups shouldn’t bother with detailed business plans: Mike Moritz

Maybe, but startups should not come into that first meeting with a potential investor with nothing but a nice smile and a firm handshake. The point of a business plan is simply the intellectual exercise of crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. No investor really believes that it’s a rigid plan, but investors do want to have confidence that you have figured out the moving parts and have a well formed idea of the direction you need to go in. I don’t get detailed business plans for any of the deals we look at, but we do expect to see evidence of detailed planning behind the great teams.

Link: Start-ups shouldn’t bother with detailed business plans: Mike Moritz.

According to BusinessWeek’s Deal Flow blog, Michael Moritz, a general partner at VC firm Sequoia Capital and an early investor in Google, Yahoo! and Cisco, while speaking at the VentureOne conference in San Francisco told a story about Google that demonstrated why VCs always say they invest in entrepreneurs or ideas–and not business plans.As you might know, Google started out thinking it would