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