If you’re about to raise money, there are some helpful comments in a series of Venture Hack articles, starting wtih Venture Hacks — How do I find a lead investor? Part 1.:
Summary: Financings happen when you find a lead investor, negotiate a term sheet, and if there’s room, politely tell followers that they can take it or leave it. Alternatively, if you have a group of seed investors who aren’t asking you to find a lead, you can mass syndicate the round without a lead. Finally, ‘find a lead’ often means ‘no’.
From Union Square Ventures (A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing): Twitter Raises A Second Round Of Funding:
Our portfolio company Twitter announced today that they have closed a second round of financing, led by Spark Capital and including Jeff Bezos’ investment entity Bezos Expeditions. Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage, another existing investor, also participated in the round.
We remain very excited by the power of marrying communications and social media in the form of small microblog messages shared between friends and followers. Twitter will use the financing to shore up its infrastructure which is the number one priority of the company right now.
So maybe there’s hope for Twitter infrastructure improving now…
In the article Start Me Up this week, Oregon Business Magazine featured 14 Portland area startups, including:
Toonlet
Values of n
JanRain
NuScale Power
WeoGeo
Lumeno.us
Interasi
Lunarr.com
OsoEco
goneraw.com
networthiq.com
grabb.it
walkertracker.com
urbandrinks.com
Earlier this month TechCrunch launched Elevator Pitches, a site for startup CEOs and founders to upload a 60-second video explaining what their companies do and how they make money. Since the launch, they’ve simplified the upload process. In the blog post Elevator Pitches, Now Ready For Your Uploads, Erick Schonfeld pointed to the following 3 pitches as good examples:
SmugMug, mEGo, and WrapMail
Next Monday is the deadline to apply for the intensive 5-day entrepreneurship program. The actual program will be August 25-29. For more info:
http://www.lab2market.pdx.edu/
The cost: free
As reported in the 2008 State Technology and Science Index from the Milken Institute:
Job creation statistics bear out the importance of entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy. In the second half of the 1990s, businesses with fewer than 100 employees created 75 percent of all new jobs in the United States. Moreover, 15 percent of the fastest-growing new firms accounted for more than 90 percent of net new job creation.
Source: Chris Edwards, “Entrepreneurs Creating the New Economy,” ed. Joint Economic Committee Staff Report (2000).
From the Portland Business Journal today, Intel Capital is leading a $50 million round to set up SpectrWatt Inc., a solar cell startup that will build a manufacturing plant in Hillsboro.
From Sales 2.0: What is a Sales Cycle?: ”
By Nigel Edelshain, Sales 2.0
How long is your sales cycle? How do we shorten our sales cycle? Interesting questions but how do you answer these if you don’t know what your sales cycle is?
Check out the full post for the answer!
From Ask The VC: What’s An Appropriate Equity Package For A Founding Board Member?
The answer in the post is 0.25% to 1%, which compares pretty well to numbers I’ve seen elsewhere.
From Will Price: Team Chemistry, Stress, and Success – Some good observations on how important chemistry is in a startup team — and how the stress of a startup can test that chemistry!
