A venture capital firm that gets money from charitable contributions? A New York Times article from last week, Venture Financing with a Mission Beyond Profit, talked about how Jumpstart, Inc. does just that for Cleveland.
“In Boston or Silicon Valley, you don’t need entities like Jumpstart. But here in the Midwest, you need a little goosing, and CardioInsight is a good example of a company that would not have existed if a group of organizations had not proactively worked to pull the pieces together to form it,” …
Portland is no Cleveland — but it might need a little “goosing”, and the Jumpstart approach might be an interesting fit for the creative and sometimes vc-resistant tech culture in Portland.
Your thoughts?
From John Cook’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer VC Notebook: Venture Capital: Business owner can rev up with Accelerator:
The idea: provide entrepreneurs with a support group and a series of intensive classes on what it takes to grow a business.
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To qualify, entrepreneurs must have $250,000 in sales and be younger than 47. Cost is $1,000, which entitles students to four classes throughout the year and access to local members of the organization.
In Seattle, members include WetPaint’s Ben Elowitz, Mostly Muffins’ Molly Wilmot and REM Medical’s Russell Benaroya.
I enjoy using Jott, so I couldn’t resist mentioning the post from Sales 2.0: Maximizing your effectiveness with Jott: ” by Karl Goldfield
If you didn’t already know:
Jott.com allows you to call a toll free number and leave yourself or others a message. That message once complete is e-mailed to you or anybody you connect with your account.
Here are just two of Karl’s uses of Jott:
- I call Jott every time I buy something and log the purchase in my inbox. This has saved me an unbelievable amount of time when my wife and I do the budget. It also eliminates the several hundred dollar adjustment do to discrepancies. I lose track of something each month and the wife is not appreciative of this habit. While this may not be a problem for the rest of you, I am happy to be more on top of things.
- Jott gets a call anytime I am driving and have a good idea. Man this one is hot! So many of my ‘ Eureka ‘s’ or powerful messaging statements come to me while I am in the car. In the past, by the time I can get it to paper or the computer, it has been diluted by time.
Like Karl, I use Jott to email “hot ideas” to myself — and just to make sure I capture that elusive “to-do” item that crossed my mind in the middle of my morning commute. (Did you ever think of something you “really need to do” but somehow it slips your mind before you get it written down?)
With Jott, a quick call on the cell phone puts that idea or to-do in my email in-box so I get a reminder when I get to work. It’s a very handy tool, and it’s free.
From John Cook’s Venture Blog: Entrepreneur mulls clean tech incubator
Allen Barteld is now leading the charge to set up a new incubator in Hood River, Oregon, fashioned after Y-Combinator. It could provide initial funding and support to as many as 10 wind, solar and other clean tech startup companies each year. There are challenges, as noted in Cook’s article:
Of course, plenty of hurdles exist in transferring (the Y-Combinator) model to clean tech companies. For one, Barteld has never operated an incubator and has virtually no experience in the clean tech field. (He previously ran a legal staffing company called The Associates and now operates a software business under that name).
Barteld recognizes that the new incubator will only succeed with the right people involved. He’s currently trying to recruit a director, noting that he will quickly “get out of the way” when that person is identified.
The second big problem is that clean tech companies typically require large amounts of capital, with that money spread over years of development. Compare that to a YCombinator startup that can go from idea to product to customer feedback in a matter of weeks.
Garr Reynold’s post Presentation Zen: Robert McKee on the power of story summarizes some of the major points screen writer Robert McKee makes about the power of story telling, as described in McKee’s book “Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting”, and in an article he wrote on the topic in the June, 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review (you can order a PDF of the article here.)
“A big part of a CEO’s job is to motivate people to reach certain goals. To do that she must engage their emotions, and the key to their hearts is story.” The most common way to persuade people, says McKee, is with conventional rhetoric and an intellectual process that in the business world “…usually consists of a PowerPoint presentation” in which leaders build their case with statistics and quotes, etc. McKee says rhetoric is problematic because while we are making our case others are arguing with us in their heads using their own statistics and sources. Even if you do persuade through argument, says McKee, this is not good enough because “…people are not inspired to act on reason alone.” The key, then, is to aim to unite an idea with an emotion, which is best done through story. “In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener’s emotion and energy.”
A recent Forbes article, Don’t Quit Your Day Job – Forbes.com described the benefits of keeping your day job while working on a new venture.
You can’t count on bankers or angels to get your venture off the ground. So maybe you should shoehorn it around a 9-to-5 career
Samuel Tharp spends 50 hours a week as a vice president at ZoomInfo, an Internet search service that helps companies find information about prospective employees. After work Tharp, 39, returns to his Acton, Mass. home and spends two hours on another job: He is the founder of year-old Otrib.com, a service that helps people plan funerals, send death notices and write tributes to those who have passed away. In April Otrib had 25,000 unique visitors who spent 15 minutes, on average, on the site.
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Not so long ago an Internet venturelet like Otrib might have seen a swarm of venture capital firms, or at least some commercial banks offering high-priced loans. Nowadays such financiers want to see businesses with revenue, customers and a logo solidly in place before they commit capital. “It’s a betting game,” says Jeffrey Carr, executive director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at New York University. “The things that used to be differentiators are now requirements. It’s harder to stand out.”
Good point – you need traction these days to get funding. The problem is that it’s hard to make headway on a startup when you’re spending 40+ hours per week on a day job! If there were just more hours in the day…
Tony Wright recently mentioned a post from last December that Evan Williams made on How to Evaluate a new product idea. If you’re trying to narrow down that long list of ideas you have into the one the you just have to pursue, Evan’s post provides good food for thought. His top-level items:
- Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
- Obviousness: Is it clear why people should us it?
- Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
- Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
- Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
- Monetizability: How hard will it be to extract the money?
- Personally Compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?
From VentureBeat: VC investments drop 12 percent from last year, fewest deals since 2005:
Venture capitalists invested $6.64 billion into U.S. companies in the second quarter, or 12 percent less compared to the same period last year, according to Dow Jones.
Another research group, led by PwC and NVCA, reported flat growth from last year, although a decline from the first quarter.
On the other hand, as reported in the Oregonian (using Dow Jones data), Oregon investments were up (to $130 million) in the first half of 2008. Examples included:
- Castor & Pollux Pet Works, Clackamas: Organic pet food, $21.7 million
- NexPlanar Corp., Hillsboro: Semiconductors, $14.5 million
- Neopad, Hillsboro: Polishing pads for semiconductors: $14.1 million
- Wi-Chi, Tualatin: Semiconductors, $8 million
- Splashcast, Portland: online marketing, $4 million
- iMove Inc., Portland: video surveillance for defense and security, $4.25 million
From the Wall Street Journal: Independent Street : What Business Owners Worry Most About Now summarizes the findings of a report from the National Federation of Independent Business. The list:
1. Cost of health insurance
2. Cost of natural gas, propane, gasoline, diesel, fuel oil
3. Federal taxes on business income
4. Property taxes (real, inventory, or personal property)
5. Tax complexity
6. Unreasonable government regulations
7. State taxes on business income
8. Cost of supplies/inventories
9. Electricity costs (rates)
10. Workers’ compensation costs
How does that compare to your top worries?
From Information Arbitrage: Monitor110: A Post Mortem, Roger Ehrenberg walks through the 7 deadly sins committed by failed startup Monitor110. The 7 sins, in summary:
- The lack of a single, “the buck stops here” leader until too late in the game
- No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
- Too much PR, too early
- Too much money
- Not close enough to the customer
- Slow to adapt to market reality
- Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board
It’s worth reading the full post on how things like “too much money” decreased the odds of success.
