Last night, I had the fortunate experience of appearing on my first panel at DartBoston. We were picking apart the startup RiotVine, who was kind enough to fall victim to our snarls. I had the pleasure of sitting next to some very interesting minds, notably (going from right to left) our graceful moderator Cort Johnson, Nick the ultranurd, Vadim the microfinance revolutionary, and then me, the babbling incoherent idiot. Luckily, Nick and Vadim carried the show, and I, by association was made to look relatively cogent. If you’d like to take a gander, check it out below. It’s about 30 minutes of high packed action.
Posts Tagged ‘VC’
DartBoston Panel
November 6th, 2009Weird Dream
November 3rd, 2009**Curious readers** This is not turning into a random dream blog where I rant about my latest night time hallucinations, commenting on how I flew around like a bumblebee and then transmogrified into yogurt which was somehow being eaten by my roommate. It was, however, investing related so I thought I would talk about it.
- Image by kevindooley via Flickr
Last night, I had a dream where I was going through my Google Reader catching up on my favorite entrepreneurs, VCs and randoms. While catching up on a local venture capitalist by the name of Bijan Sabet, the post count kept scrolling out of control. First 10 posts to read, then 50, then a 1000. I couldn’t keep up! I couldn’t read fast enough! The dream ended in a very bizarre way which doesn’t actually make any sense, and at the time I didn’t really think anything of it. That is, until I got to the office, started catching up a bit and saw that Bijan’s post today was entitled, “Dream“.
I love coincidences.
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Venture Capitalists and the myth of the anonymous business plan
October 11th, 2009
It’s a commonly held truism that venture capitalists don’t invest in an entrepreneur that hasn’t been introduced through their network. I’m sure that everyone has that one story of the entrepreneur who emails a firm on a lark and ends up with 5 million in financing. The one I know of is that of Tony Hsieh who invested in Zappos after a message left on his voicemail. This is hardly the norm, and I’ve personally seen how hard it is to get ahold of investors.
So why is it that so many venture capitalists have links on their websites to “submit your business plan”? Does anyone actually do this? Is it to perpetuate the myth that these firms are approachable?
Here’s a better solution: use LinkedIn, or rather, this nice little mashup here. This bad boy will tell users how many people they know at your firm via their own networks. I think this could be phenomenally powerful if I were looking for financing and I got to your site and saw that by virtue of my connections, I knew 2 associates and a partner at your firm. Now I can get an intro and actually have my business plan heard, as opposed to dismissed out of hand.
