By AMY CORTESE for NY Times
RYAN CALDBECK was stumped. A director at a private equity firm, he was taking part in a panel discussion at a consumer goods conference last summer in New York when an entrepreneur raised his hand with a question: Where could a young company with just a few million dollars in sales go for money to grow?
Mr. Caldbeck and his peers on the panel fumbled for a response. The fact is, most private equity investors and venture capitalists won’t touch a consumer products company until it has surpassed $10 million in sales — anything else is too small to bother with.
The best advice the panel could offer was for the entrepreneur to tap his credit cards.
“The purpose of the panel was to help entrepreneurs raise money, but we had no answers,” Mr. Caldbeck remembers. “That’s when I knew that there is a big issue here.”