Venture Adventure

While on an emergency trip to the east coast a few weeks ago, we arranged for a cleaning crew to come in and clean my parents home. Typical of home cleaning services, this one was three Hispanic women. They did a top-to-bottom cleaning of the house, since they hadn’t been there in over 6 months.

Their outfits included shirts from Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, and Izod. In fact, the entire crew was swathed head to toe in designer clothing – shirts, pants, shoes, and handbags.

Does janitorial attire signal the death of your brand?

It’s always nice to read someone who really speaks their mind:

“Idiots” Is Far Too Kind. (Dumb Bastards? Venal Jerks? Value-Destroying, Customer-Insensitive Clowns?)

Working with the Angel Community – Angel vs. VC was the theme of this Startup-U session. While no angels were on the panel, it was still very useful, as the three VC’s represented 3 different VC funding/business models.

Bart Schachter of Blueprint Ventures represented the traditional VC model – A VC with a large fund, making typical A rounds of $3 – $5M, and needing a 10x – 20x return in order to “move the needle” of their portfolio for their LPs.

Carl Showalter of Opus Capital represented the smaller VCs.  Opus does both seed and A rounds, and will entertain much smaller A rounds – $1M or so.  They expect to typically partner with at least one other VC in an A round.  Opus will also do a bridge loan in lieu of a seed/A round in order to get some quick forward movement if they believe that they will eventually do an A round.

Doug Renert of Tandem Entrepreneurs represents a newer model of VC that I would best describe as Small VC meets incubator.  Tandem will fund a seed/A round of typically less than $1M with the intent that Tandem’s VCs will be extremely active in the day-to-day operations of the startup, rather than just providing guidance on a monthly basis.

There was some good discussion and interplay between the audience and the panelists, although much of it was introduction to VC/Introduction to these particular VC firms.

One interesting topic was sales people for pre-product/pre-revenue startups.  Both Bart and Carl were very positive on a company if they had sales people at this stage (assuming the salesman was good).  Good salespeople can earn a lot of commission dollars working for the large enterprise players.  There’s a lot of goodness if they’re committed to a startup without immediate revenue opportunities.

Networking both before and after the event was good, and I met a lot of good people.  I had an interesting conversation with Cooper Marcus of Spark Parking.   Cooper mentioned that he had recently attended a mobile startup pitch event.  He said that anytime one of the companies mentioned that they required either interaction/cooperation of the carrier, or to download their program onto the phone, the company received immediate, emphatic negative feedback.  Working with the carriers is extremely difficult, and there are a raft of problems with phone downloads.  This was great feedback for me, as my current thought are wrapped around a mobile service.

Two weeks ago, I received the call you never want to receive.

My dad: “Your mother is going into the hospital.  The doctors are concerned about complications from her knee replacement surgery.”

After two hips and a knee, this knee replacement was supposed to be her last.  About 6 weeks later, she was running a fever of 103, and was quite sick.  The doctors were concerned about a possible embolism, or infection.  So I flew out to the east coast (thank you, Jet Blue).

While I was winging my way eastward, the doctors did a thoracic MRI, looking for an embolism.  Instead, they found really inflamed and swollen lymph nodes.  They did a biopsy of the lymph nodes, and then gave antibiotics.

The fever finally cleared, my mom started to feel better, and the doctors released her from the hospital.  The infectious disease doctors found nothing, so they declared the problem lymphoma, and made an appointment for my mother with the oncologist.  The hard part was that we couldn’t find out pathology results.  After a few days, they said that they were having a hard time in the lab, so they sent a sample to NIH.

Just this morning, my mother went back for a post-op follow-up with the surgeon who performed the biopsy.  The surgeon said that indications now are leading to a conclusion of a benign problem, rather than a cancerous problem.  The surgeon was surprised that we still didn’t have lab results, and immediately got on the phone to put peoples toes to the fire.  While we’re still not sure, things are looking better and better.

Now that I’m back home, and have better news, I’m finally able to get back to working on my startup and my life in general