Is the success of a startup positively or negatively correlated to the quantity and quality of its advisors?

Dopplr is headquartered in London but owned and operated by Dopplr Ltd. in Helsinki, Finland. The service is based on the idea of “intention broadcasting” where you publish your intention to visit somewhere in the future, thus making happy coincidences in your social network less and less coincidental (and thus happier, more efficient). Where or from whom the original idea came from is lost in the mists of time (perhaps someone can enlighten us in the comments?).

Anyway, the purchase price is said to be between €10 million and €15 million. We first covered Dopplr in 2007 when it closed on seed funding.

Supposedly it has raised just €1.25 million or so in total funding although exact figures were never announced, even though they assembled a stellar groups of backers who have much deeper pockets than that.

Get a load of this: Martin Varsavsky (FON), Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Saul Klein (TAG), Esther Dyson (Angel), Tyler Brûlé (Meeja), Thomas Glocer (Thomson Reuters) and Lars Hinrichs (Xing). I mean, good grief, most startups would kill and maim to have that kind of board. As good as this purported exit is, clearly these people thought Dopplr would go way, way bigger than a €15m exit.

Read more.  Obviously, I think it’s great to have advisors (and angel investors) but sometimes:

- to win those people over you have to agree to things you might not really agree to.

- you end up getting this false sense of hope that these folks will actually help, when more often than not, what you get is great advice, of which 10% is relevant to you or practical.

- realistically, if you need the cash, angels are great… but if you don’t need the cash, raising money from angels is almost harder and more frustrating.

Let me give you a personal anecdote:

I have a number of great informal/unofficial advisors.  What I lack however are a lot of media-centric advisors.

There are a few existing media executives that I chat to, some of whom are clients, suppliers, competitors in fact.  But when it comes to the traditional angel/advisor role, most of the people I count on as advisors are either general businesspeople, technology guys or entrepreneurs in other fields.

I’ve always wondered why media angels or advisors have proven elusive and I think I know why.

Media-savvy angels (former executives of big media companies basically) have seen first hand what technology did to traditional media, so they are now more apt to invest (be it time or money) in tech startups, and not content, even though we are disrupting traditional media even more profoundly than tech startups are (in some ways).

So despite the fact that we ourselves are a disruptor as a new media company, a lot of the media advisors I would love to have on board retain fairly entrenched mentalities as “old media types” and are drawn to tech plays, which is fine and a motif in my life as the founder of WatchMojo.com.

Dopplr was a social networking site focused on travel.  To see how we disrupt the media pillars through video content, check our travel channel here.

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