Upcoming Talk: Investment Criteria for Entrepreneurs

I’ve been asked to speak at the upcoming OpenBeta3 event organized by the ExtendedBeta community.

I’ve been asked to talk about the investment criteria that angel investors, seed funds and venture capitalists use to evaluate investment in technology startups, and in the process I’ll be discussing the investment criteria I’ve developed during my investment career and that we currently use at Black Mesa Ventures.

This will be a part of PitchCamp, presented 24 hours before OpenBeta3 in preparation for the new 24HourPitch activity, which will be occurring during the event.

In the process of preparing my notes, I went back through some of my favorite posts on this topic and I’ve listed some posts and useful resources. Enjoy!

• Reid Hoffman’s TechCrunch post on this topic is one of my favorites: Reid Hoffman: My Rule of Three for Investing
• Some of the resources maintained by Garage.com are classics. Particularly check the articles on preparing an executive summary, preparing your presentation slides, and the articles “Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs” and “Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists.”
• When pitching your business, you will want to have prepared a “pitch deck”  – a set of slides to quickly communicate your investment proposition. Looking through other company’s slides is a great way to  think about what you need to say and how others have said it. Here’s a suggested format from i2E, the public-private commercialization non-profit for the State of Oklahoma.
• For later stage venture capital, the Murphree Venture Partners investment philosophy page conveys a lot of information very succinctly: http://www.murphreeventures.com/philosophy.htm

Awesome exhortation from Steve Jobs: “Real Artists Ship.”

As work progresses at Black Mesa Ventures on the launch version of GEOINTELIS, I ran across this blog entry:
Ghost in the Pixel » Only real artists ship

I heard Guy Kawasaki say something similar at a conference I was at least year: Just ship it. It won’t be perfect, but it won’t be anything until you get a copy into users’ hands so that they can rip it up and you can start fixing it.

And I would add that your competitors are always innovating around you, especially as technical costs have declined and barriers to market entry have fallen. Launch now, or don’t launch at all.

Launching in the tail-end of a recession is perfect because it positions your product or service to benefit from recovery spending, especially if you’re offering a lower cost, lower upfront investment, or significantly faster or better product. *

Always remember: Until it ships, its just a concept.

* All of these apply to GEOINTELIS.

Blog Roundup – Build an Insanely Great Web Service, The Mint.com Acquisition by Intuit

Quick blog roundup of things I’m reading:

Great post on ReadWriteWeb on what a great web service should accomplish: Build an Insanely Great Web Service.

An interesting, although highly generalized, post on Slate.com about the purchase of Mint.com by Intuit for $170MM last week: The Triumph of Web 2.5

A different take on the purchase of Mint.com from a founder of 37Signals.com: The next generation bends over

Regarding the Intuit purchase, it seems naive to think that incumbents won’t buy emerging competitors, or that those new contenders won’t sell…

But Mint does look like a bit of a recession victim: With a strong growth pattern, increasing revenues and a good technical and psychological lead, I’m sure it could have gotten a lot more in another 24 months, so the logical thing would have been to wait.

Which means there probably was a VC who needed out in order to repay the LPs in their fund, and forced the sale. More background will probably emerge in coming days.

(cross-posted on Facebook.)

Personal Productivity Tips II – Update

Writing this blog can be very helpful. In writing recently about my personal productivity tips, it occurred to me that I was really using too many “to do” processes.

Moving stuff from my GTD Master List to a daily list was a pain and inevitably got out of date. What I needed, of course, was a personal task management system that incorporates all of my needs.

Being involved in several startups, I’ve got a lot riding on my productivity and execution. My to-do list is a critical tool in my productivity toolbox. I needed an upgrade.

Surely there was a relatively inexpensive, complete solution out there for managing daily tasks?

I know how I work and what I need:

• Good hierarchical project organization
• The ability to easily find and display a “daily task list” even though the individual tasks live inside a project hierarchy
• The ability to set deadlines, where relevant
• The ability to create sequential ordering of tasks (rather than just tossing them into folders)
• The ability to export and/or print all projects, sub-projects, tasks by priority, tasks by due date.

Wow. Sounds like a lot, but really, it is just an object or folder tree with a few to-do list functions thrown in. No problem, right? (more…)