Shark Tank is a TV reality competition show that five or six investor tycoons pitch against the aspiring entrepreneurs for investment and fund. The contestants make business presentations briefly. They talked about the exchange of 15% of the company with $100K or something like this. You’d think how a business deal can be decided within 15 minutes. It must be like an impulse buying and most impulse buying is not good investment. However, you watch the show and see the exchange of the idea and figure, you realize the deal can be made and the outcome may not be that bad after all. In fact, most of the deals go pretty well as the time can tell.
Well, after watching the Shark Tank, you start to wonder why the VC business in the real world is so complicate and time consuming to arrange. Perhaps VC & ST are the two extremes of the same business. VC depends on the detail analysis and number crunching to reach the conclusion as to invest or not. In contrast, ST depends on a brief presentation, some general number & figure and mainly some quickie inquiries and gut feeling to make decision, invest or not, ie make a deal or I am out.
In VC, the fund is a pool of money from various sources. In ST, the fund is from the shark 100%. The investor is like CEO or the owner of the project, so he can say yes or no in the right spot. It is not a team sport. It is not a symphony, it is a solo instrument. It is like a special case of business investment. It is like one-man company with a lot of money fund. You go out to seek and buy some business deals. You try to bid against other people and try to get deal at the lowest possible cost you can get. Meanwhile you skip all others you don’t think they are worth the time and effort. I wonder why this business model can’t be executed on the street, Wall Street or City Street. To push this further, why can’t we do it on the Internet? With instant video conference, the Shark Tank can be assembled easily and performed in a daily basis. The investor shark & aspired entrepreneur can be screened and qualified depending on the particular business model.
The figures and numbers most of the time are beyond my head. I know one thing I can't do is to make the decision right there within 15 minutes. I sort of admire those Sharks, they sure look sharp on number and have keen sense of the nature of business. Some of us work in the high tech industry know that it is hard to write a business plan and proposal. It is even harder to meet those VC investors. Now these five or six sharks look at those small fishes in the tank. It is sometime hard to watch the episode without emotion. You either feel good, bad, distress or downright disgusting when the shark calls fish cockroach or something else. The Shark Tank looks like a micro-cosmos of VC as it tries to compress 6-month VC process to a 15-minute decision. I kind of think the shark can not lose as long as there are enough good & reasonable proposals come along. After all, if you have the cash, you are the king.
