Venture Adventure

Panel to be announce

The Private Equity Venture Capital Club, one of the SCU MBA clubs, hosted an evening round-table with Jim Marshal, of Selby Venture Partners, and Bill Baumel, of RWI Ventures, discussing how to become a VC.

Their general advice could be summed up as: get technical training, then join a hot startup and become the product manager.  This will allow you to get the proper experience, as well as to impress the VCs and directors of your company.  If you’re good enough, they might invite you.  The problem, they explained, is that the VC community is very closed and tight-nit, and it’s hard to break in.  Like most other jobs and career transitions, networking is the best method to get your foot in the door.

There were three guest speakers at this month’s Technology Ventures Corporation entrepreneurial training session. #4 in sequence, the session covered various aspects of the business plan.

Sarah Jane Militello, of TVC, focused on the business plan itself. She covered all of the typical items in the business plan, and emphasized how important the marketing section is, especially for the technical entrepreneur with little business or marketing experience. No other earth shattering revelations.

Brenda Besdansky of Speakers World led a workshop on developing your elevator pitch. The workshop was pretty hard to follow, given the size of the audience (approx. 100), and the venue (an auditorium type facility). However, she handed out a worksheet to help develop the pitch, and an evaluation sheet to help in practice and refinement.

(Edit 24 Apr 07: Brenda contacted me to inform me that the worksheet and evaluation form are copyright material.  I’ve removed them.  Please accept my apologies.)

The last guest was Geoff Roach, an angel investor with the Keiretsu Forum. Geoff provided details on the Keiretsu Forum and what their evaluation process is. His slides are here.

SVASE presented a discussion around hiring for your startup. The panel included Phil “Pud” Kaplan (Fucked Company, Adbrite), Jonathan Abrams (Socializr), Andy Gadiel (Jambase), and Dan Grosh (Nosal Partners).

Over the course of the hour, three main themes emerged:

• Just Do It (Thanks, Nike).
  All of the entrepreneurs discussed, in one form or another, their startup stories, and that they really didn’t think about starting a business, they just did it. They didn’t wait, and they didn’t accept no for an answer.
• Hire them young and trainable (especially the programmers)
  Goes against conventional wisdom, but they all said that the NCGs (new college grads) and young hackers were the most up-to-date on the technology, as well as having the passion, drive, and desire to work the long, hard hours necessary.
• Focus on product, then on marketing
  They created the product, on a shoe string budget, with little help, then launched the product. Then started building the company, hiring marketing people, putting money into building brands and subscribers.

A few other interesting tidbits:

• Hire programmers from Craigs List.
• Avoid Hotjobs, Monster, etc. – very low signal to noise ratio
• Putting the salary expectations in the job listing can help you target the right candidate – this applies to every position, including the admins.

A worthwhile hour of time.

Rohit Sharma, of Mohr Davidow Ventures, led a discussion about what goes into the entrepreneurial pitch. This event was part of the Stanford BASES (Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students) E-Challenge business plan competition.

Rohit’s main theme was that powerpoint is a necessary evil. But it is evil, so be aware of what you are doing. Avoid bullet points, use a sans-serif font, use no more than 5 lines, and use cue cards so that you don’t have to look at the screen to read your text. Most of this is (or should be), by now, common knowledge.

The best part was Rohit’s reference to Edward Tufte, and his seminal book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information . This was the first time I’d heard Tufte mentioned outside statistical circles, and Rohit was highly complementary of Tufte and VDQI. Hopefully this will be of use to the Stanford students, both in the entrepreneurial efforts, and in their student life.