The latest VC survey is out from the National Association of Venture Capitalists, in partnership with SpencerStuart. The 2010 data is compared against a similar survey conducted in 2001, and the key results are pretty darned consistent. The top-line results I want to call out are the VC community’s responses to being asked to rank “the most important factors in your decision to fund a venture.”
When ranking the most important factors they are looking for in fundable businesses, VCs provide a pretty short list:
1. Management Team (36%)
2. Market Sector (25%)
3. Business Model (20%)
4. Proprietary Product or Service (19%)
Fewer than 20% of the survey respondents listed the product or service as the #1 factor in funding a business. And that number (19%) was exactly the same number and ranking as in the 2001 survey.
One might ask whether this result reinforces the view that the venture capital model is "broken”—increasingly misaligned with the waves of new businesses being created today by “no-name” kids in incubators across the globe, and with the new ways in which momentum can be increased dramatically via the Internet. On the other hand, this result could also point to a key “truth” in the startup world, similar to so many other well-worn aphorisms like “it’s not what you know, but who you know” that tend to be proven by exception only. Yesterday I judged one of four semi-final rounds of the Business Plan Competition at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Our goal was to advance one of our four presenting teams into the final round of the competition. Simple enough, right? Wrong. In our case, we had three teams that fit what has become a fairly “standard” business plan competition pattern: a bio-tech or medical products based on university- or corporate-generated IP. And then there was YongoPal…. Ah, YongoPal – among all the suits and ties, here was a startup that could have been lifted from Y Combinator, TechStars, or any Silicon Valley or Austin, TX event. Dressed in matching t-shirts, the founders of YongoPal exhibited a controlled confidence in their market knowledge, a clear focus on a market segment, and a lack of presumption about their company’s market potential. Did they want to become a platform for international language learning? No. Did they want to enter markets besides Korea? No. Did they want to expand beyond college students? Maybe, but not right now. I argued hard during the semi-final judging round to advance YongoPal to the final round. Our panel ended up deadlocked, so we actually advanced two teams: YongoPal and another team who had some interesting IP and the usual bio-medical profile. Why did I push the case for a zero-IP startup with few customers? It’s called CLARITY, folks. And while we can argue all day long about the market prospects for a small startup with zero IP, commodity technology, and better-funded “professional” competitors, what YongoPal did was present an incredibly clear picture of its market, the reasons for choosing it, the things that make it unique, and how they plan to attack it. And they did this with a clear-eyed confidence that wasn’t arrogant, but evinced the street-level research they had done to understand just what the heck they were aiming for. In nearly every other case—specifically in the cases of all the finalists in the bio-medical space—huge assumptions were made, from revenue projections to time-to-market estimates to purchasing dynamics. And given the time-to-market for many of these products, a few-degree variance becomes the wrong side of the galaxy by the time 2014 or beyond arrives. In contrast, YongoPal was aiming for a time frame closer to, say, next Tuesday. And it worked. Prior to the final round presentations, I told the team that they were clearly the dark horse in this race, and that they should embrace that fully—trying to put on the trappings of their more “typical” competitors would have only looked phony. Live or die, YongoPal proved that a super-tight focus, a ton of genuine passion and interest in your business, and a strong, personal understanding of a market can go a long way in convincing others to support you in whatever path you choose to take. Congrats, YongoPal. On 12 December 2009, I spent the day at Add-On Con ‘09 in Mountain View, California. The format was similar to last year’s event, again being held at the Computer History Museum just around the corner from Microsoft’s main Silicon Valley Campus, as well as just down the street from high-buzz browser upstart, Google. Mozilla and Windows IE8 provided Platinum sponsorship, but it was Gold sponsor Google that probably generated the most excitement during the event. This was to be expected: earlier in the week Google had announced an extensions platform for its Chrome browser—news that, along with a number of other tidbits like Chrome surpassing Apple’s Safari browser in some key usage metrics—made for a pretty positive week for the company. IE had some good sessions on solving extensibility issues in IE8, but the clear attendee favorites were both Chrome’s extension efforts as well as Mozilla’s Firefox Jetpack, a new project that, in the words of Mozilla, “enables anyone who knows HTML, CSS, and (I presume they mean or) JavaScript to create powerful Firefox add-ons.” Perhaps the most interesting session for me was “Distribution Choices for Add-on’s,” in which Ryan Weber from W3i, Adam Boyden from Conduit, and Chester Ng from OpenCandy discussed a wide range of techniques—including their own offerings but going well beyond those—for increasing the reach of browser add-ons. I was happy to see the IE team trying to remain engaged in this community, which, to be perfectly frank, is highly oriented toward Firefox and Chrome. I hope that the IE team is able to continue its efforts to help developers succeed using IE, but I also suspect that some fundamental decisions regarding the future of add-ons within IE need to be clarified and communicated so that developers have a clear understanding of where IE is heading in relation to the major competing browser vendors. It is clear from Microsoft’s own recent PDC event in Los Angeles that work is well underway for IE9, and progress around speed and acid3 test matrices is being made. Taking the long view, however, there are now clearly multiple elephants in the browser and browser add-on room. Sparks flew—literally—at last week’s Startup DEMO event put on by MIT Forum Northwest. The six finalists had already made it through multiple screening rounds, and I think that all event attendees got a great slice of Northwest entrepreneurship's broad range of backgrounds and interests. On 10 December 2009, The MIT Enterprise Forum, Northwest Chapter held its semi-annual Northwest Startup DEMO event at the One Union Square Boardroom in Seattle. BizSpark was one of the primary sponsors for the event. This event was a first, in that all six of the primary angel investment organizations were represented on the judging panel: Alliance of Angels, Keiretsu Forum, Puget Sound Venture Club, Seraph Capital Forum, Tacoma Angel Network, and Zino Society. In addition to these investors, I participated as an event judge during both the screening round in November but also in this final presentation round. The following startups made it through the screening rounds by presenting a combination of not only an interesting startup concept but also an entertaining demo that really showcased the value offered by the startup. Finalists for the event were: Competitors - Aquapulser Engineering: Offers an add-on ignition module that converts weak sparks into a high-current plasma
- Basic Athletic Measurement: Builds the world's first athletic testing platform to drive consistency, reliability, and validity into global athletic performance measurements and ratings
- Exponential Entertainment: Provides HollywoodPlayer™, a multi-platform games service for users to discover, share, and play with real scenes from Hollywood movies
- Limeade: Supplies cross-platform mobile and social wellness tools
- Pharaoh Software: Develops a system which controls Windows applications through a UI to provide automated technical support
- Zooppa: The world's largest source of user-generated advertising
Now, in most startup competitions like this, the judges are asked to evaluate startups based on overall viability, potential impact, business model, etc. But for this particular event, the judges were asked to really place emphasis on the quality and impact of the demo itself—in part to showcase Northwest technologies but also to provide attendees with a compelling exhibition. Each of the competing startups did a fine job of presenting, and the results might have been different if they were being judged purely on investment potential, but in the end Aquapulser Engineering, with its live demo of its plasma ignition system enhancement technology—along with the founder’s smart, informative, and humorous responses to questions from the judging panel—was the overall winner. The voting was not unanimous—the quality of these six companies was very high relative to many other startup events I’ve seen in the past—so congratulations to the Aquapulser team for doing a fantastic, informative demo! I’ve been working with Seattle startup Cheezburger Network—creators of humor sites like icanhazcheezburger, failblog, thisisphotobomb, and others—for a while now, so I was especially thrilled at today’s kickoff of Microsoft PDC, our Professional Developer’s Conference. Martin Cron, a lead developer for the startup, was part of Ray Ozzie’s keynote address announcing Azure support for Wordpress. In addition to Wordpress’s Matt Mullenweg, who prefaced his own Azure demo by saying that he first looked out the window to make sure pigs weren’t flying, Martin announced a new Cheezburger site, running live on Azure, called OddlySpecific. OddlySpecific emerged from a number of submissions to failblog that, while funny, didn’t really qualify as “fails.” Many were about oddly specific signage, so thus was born the theme of the new site. I’m looking forward to continuing to work with the Cheezburger crew—it never hurts that part of my job includes LMAO on a daily basis. For a video stream of the event, as well as recorded keynotes and sessions, check out Microsoft PDC. This post feels a little weird, because there was some personally relevant and surprising weirdness around Microsoft yesterday, as a quick review of yesterday’s TechCrunch will show. But I don’t want that to detract from something that was a blast yesterday: the TechStars 2009 Reunion in Seattle. Brad Feld and David Cohen brought the whole gang, including the always entertaining Andrew Hyde, along with a cadre of TechStars graduates from 2007, 2008, and 2009, citing his idea to have the reunion in a town other than Boulder or Boston, the current homes of TechStars programs. The day started with a loosely defined “unconference” among mentors and mentees, with a manageable group of maybe 50-60, of whom probably 1/3 to 1/2 were startup founders. Three general tracks enabled attendees to pick where they wanted to participate: topics, decided the night before, included “Board and Investor Management,” “Customer Acquisition Strategies,” “Pricing,” and a half dozen more. I found the “Pricing” session especially interesting: about half a dozen entrepreneurs/TechStars graduates were exploring (read: re-assessing) the Freemium model. The point I tried to make was that, rather than assume (as several of them admitted having originally done) that the Freemium model MUST go hand in glove with Web 2.0, social, SaaS applications, each startup should think about its own product or service and how various business & pricing models might be applied. In one case, a founder had decided to “just charge something” ($8) and found zero resistance. Seattle entrepreneur and investor Andy Sack observed that if you aren’t getting some pushback on your pricing (either directly from customers or visibly in your metrics) then you are clearly undervaluing your service. In many cases, the only “free” component of your business model should be a free trial; in other cases, a true Freemium model may make sense. But getting those confused can leave a lot of money on the table. Buzz Bruggeman from Activewords also offered stories from his company’s several pricing experiments. Lunch saw about three or four groups self-forming and wandering off to eat around Seattle; after succeeding in getting our group to eat Top Pot doughnuts as an appetizer (!), Brad Feld suggested sushi, so I lead us all over to Wasabi Bistro for some great rolls, including a few more interesting options that Brad ordered just to challenge the mettle of the diners. Our topic over lunch was “raising the second round of funding.” Kudos to Filtrbox’s Ari Newman for sharing his very current experiences, and for picking up part of the lunch tab along with Brad. After taking down a few boatloads of raw sea creatures, we ambled back to the Palace for an afternoon panel of investors and a series of 10 startup pitches from TechStars graduates, many of whom are raising their next round of funding (and one—Everlater, which didn’t pitch—announcing new funding today on TechCrunch). I had to leave before the final few pitches and the reception that followed, but it was just amazing to me how a relatively small group of motivated people can create a fun, valuable event with the most minimal of scripts. Kudos to the entire TechStars team—and the entrepreneurs—for bringing a ton of great insights and some great fun to Seattle. Bryan Menell, who recently joined Dachis Group as Director of the Collaboratory, interviewed me last week about the growing interest on the part of “consumer” startups and developers in targeting enterprise environments. The interview is here. This morning I attended the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s October Venture Breakfast, where Others Online (recently acquired by Rubicon Project) founder Jordan Mitchell moderated a panel of Seattle entrepreneurs discussing some of their failed startups. It was a full room, and the candid responses from the panelists made for a really great event. I think a lot of attendees walked away with some great lessons. Panelists: Marcelo Calbucci, Seattle 2.0 founder, discussing his recent shuttering of his “main” startup Sampa Pascal Stolz, CEO of Alerts.com, discussing a past failure called IT Networks Mikhail Seregine, part of Amazon.com’s original Mechanical Turk team, on his failed startup ClayValet Having had both successes and failures in the startup world myself, much of the advice was familiar. But while some were easily agreed to among the panelists, others were more individual. Here were a few: - Always have a plan B. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t committed to your current plan.
- Pivot quickly. This was the main theme of the event, and multiple cases were offered where the panelists either made—or failed to make—fast pivots to keep their startups moving forward.
- Customer feedback is double-edged: a couple of the panelists felt it was more important for startups targeting enterprise, whereas consumers are too fickle to really know what is going to delight them. They only know it after they see it, so you can’t take a lot of their feedback early in the product development cycle.
- Despite recent snarky comments in the Valley (see Mint founder’s presentation on TechCrunch), business-oriented personnel are critical to startups. "Business people and technology people are the Yin and Yang of a startup,” said Pascal Stoltz. “You really do need both.” Several panelists, who were technologists, admitted that some more strategic business insight early on would have helped tremendously. [There is a definite current in the Valley right now that “it’s all about the technology,” but I think that’s a misunderstood comment that has been over-amplified in the Valley echo chamber.]
- Pascal made another great comment regarding knowing when your startup is doomed. In his case, the product was complicated and targeted a space few understood: “When I spoke with investors, I saw a glare or a glaze in their eyes, rather than a light.” If your audiences routinely take on a look of confusion, it might be more than your sorry presentation skills. The model, market, or technology just may be the problem.
Finally, a note on Jordan Mitchell’s comments: I was really pleased to hear Jordan admitting to the extreme variability of startup success, and especially that so much depends on market timing that is far beyond the entrepreneur’s control. In the never-ended debate over Luck v. Skill, I think more and more folks are recognizing, and admitting, that this game we play is just that: a game of chance. Best of luck to the entrepreneurs out there! In case you are one of the many who routinely confuse luck and skill when reading about startup success stories, go read the story on CSI’s creator Anthony Zuiker in the September issue of Fast Company. Ignore all the comments about how innovative or edgy Zuiker is. Instead, focus on the following points: - Zuiker “bounced through” nearly half a dozen colleges before finally graduating from UNLV in 1991. Not exactly the textbook recipe for a blockbuster career.
- “After college, Zuiker burned through a series of ‘menial jobs’ that cumulated in his driving a tram on the graveyard shift at the Mirage, for $8 an hour. “ According to Zuiker, “I was, like, I know I’m very talented…but I can’t ever really get a break.”
- Through a few connections from his college days, Zuiker finally got a “real job” writing a movie about the Harlem Globetrotters, but the project was never made.
- When Zuiker’s break finally did come, in the form of a meeting with Jerry Bruckheimer’s “TV guy,” Zuiker had nothing prepared until (quoting the article):
…one night before the meeting, my wife, who was pregnant, convinced me to stay home with her instead of sneaking out to play basketball.” They watched a Discovery Channel show about the murdered Los Angeles cheerleader Linda Sobek, whose case was solved after detectives found a hair lodged in the headrest of the car she had been in. “Right there, CSI was born,” Zuiker says. There are a few points I want to make here: 1. Talent, like beauty, is widely distributed. Yes (if you agree with The Bell Curve), this distribution is increasingly concentrated over time to elite locales (Stanford, Harvard, etc.), but highly talented people continue to emerge from unlikely origins and histories. 2. In more cases than you want to think about, the person serving you your cappuccino (or ringing up your purchase, or taking your dinner order) is smarter, more creative, and more motivated than you. In this economy, this point is likely to be true more than ever. 3. Recognizing your “break” is not always easy, because your real “break” is rarely obvious. In Zuiker’s case, was it really the call from Bruckheimer’s “TV guy,” or was it the earlier opportunity he was given to write a movie that “failed” to go to production? Because it was that script that got him the call that led to CSI. Or was it watching the Discovery Channel with his wife? 4. Since identifying your “break” is so difficult, my advice is to retain a healthy self-confidence—and not to lose heart when luck falls onto others. In addition, however, one should have the confidence to recognize that for most, “big breaks” don’t ever come. In Zen meditation, it is said that, figuratively, you must continue to “polish the tile,” but without the hope of the tile ever becoming a diamond. Do good work; keep alert for opportunity, but don’t bank your happiness on having the stars align in your favor. Betting your happiness on getting that “big break” is typically a recipe for a lifetime of disappointment. Last night’s TechFlash BBQ & Ping-Pong Tournament was a winner for all involved. Valeri Kim of Akvelon provided an example of true athleticism at the table (photo below), barely edging out Silicon Valley Bank’s Lim to take the inaugural trophy. I suspect this is going to be a recurring event, and I’m already looking forward to donning a headband and taking a few techies down before the brackets really heat up next year. There was a great turnout for the event: I was able to catch up with at least a dozen VCs and entrepreneurs I hadn’t seen in a while, and I met a lot of new folks who were out doing interesting some interesting things. From social networks for physicians to democracy-focused candidate video ballots, entrepreneurs are continuing to take their ideas to market. And in spite of continued economic challenges, the vibe at the event was very positive. Microsoft played a major sponsorship role in the event: in addition to BizSpark’s continued support of TechFlash, Microsoft’s Bing team came out in force, providing some swanky paddles, balls, and tables for the match. As one guest commented to me, “it’s great to see the Bing team using their marketing dollars on something this cool!” So congrats to the folks at Bing for sponsoring a terrific event. TechFlash’s John Cook laying down the tournament rules (note the rockin’ old-school headband in foreground): 
The party quickly spilled out into the courtyard of the Georgetown Ballroom: 
Some serious athleticism by the finalists—this was more fun to watch than I ever could have imagined: 
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Christopher Griffin
Senior Portfolio Manager
For nearly 8 years Christopher was involved in the early-stage startup and investment community in Texas. The broad business areas in which he was directly involved either as a founder or early advisor/consultant included targeted meta-search, wireless medical charting, clinical nanobiotechnology, CRM tools, and...
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Recent Posts
For Venture Capitalists, the Song
Remains the Same
June 29, 2010
YongoPal and Why Dark Horses Sometimes
Win
May 28, 2010
Add-On Con ‘09 – Multiple Elephants in This Room
December 19, 2009
MIT Enterprise Forum Northwest Startup DEMO – Shocking Results from Aquapulser
December 19, 2009
icanhazcheezburger Launches New Site on Windows Azure
November 17, 2009
TechStars 2009 Reunion was a Blast
November 5, 2009
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Featured Startup
The BizSpark startup of the day is crowdzone (mobiTeris), based in the US. Below you will find an interview with Murgesh Navar, CEO of mobiTeris. All the best to them and congratulations for being the startup of the day!
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