Angel & VC Financing
The last time I remember Scott Adams doing VC comics was in the boom. This must mean we’re there again. Dilbert comics can be found here.
I just spent two days at the IT Financing Forum and will likely be putting up some notes soon. But the quick summary is that it was a great two days with many wonderful conversations, a good overall mood, some fantastic learning, and I met quite a few new people from Vancouver as well as [...]
The Vancouver Enterprise Forum event on Web 2.0 was an evening of firsts, at least if I judged it by the number of people signing up on the spot for the event who were not regular VEF attendees, the number of people who stayed after the presentation to talk to the presenters at the front [...]
Podcast + video iPod = Porncast. BRILLIANT. Mark Morford strikes again with a brilliant and very likely insanely lucrative idea. Apple definitely won’t take it on which means that somebody somewhere should. Some choice quotes: I am the first. At least, I am the first I know of to think of this idea at this [...]
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Please forward as appropriate to your respective networks. Sorry for the late notice on this everyone, but I just found out today that a company my good friend Ean Jackson has just started with, Genesis Exchange, is looking for more good candidate companies to present their elevator pitches to a group of private equity investors. [...]
It’s that time of year again. Bob Chaworth-Musters, principal of the Angel Forum, will be hosting a one-day session where up to 34 pre-screened technology, service and manufacturing companies seeking equity funding of up to $1 million, will present to 70+ pre-screened private equity investors (80 investors registered in April). Private equity investor preferences (detailed criteria on [...]
It is a known fact that VCs “herd” – they all follow trends and all invest en masse in industries and trends. I have never heard so much alternative energy buzz in my life, not even when I attended the Environmental Studies program at UVic many years ago. Look for increasing energy related deals to [...]
I did not attend the 16th Angel Forum held in Vancouver, BC, Canada on November 22nd but I got a report back from Bob Chaworth-Musters that it was a great event, with 90 registered investors (including from Denver, Seattle, Edmonton & Calgary, Kelowna and Victoria as well as nearly all Vancouver vc fund managers) listening [...]
On November 8th & 9th, I volunteered at the Canadian IT & Biotech Financing Forum, assisting Dave Thomas, Reg Nordman, Nick Tattersall, Mary McDonald (of McDonald & Associates) and the gang from Rocketbuilders. I had the opportunity to meet the founders and entrepreneurs from 40 different companies and to watch some of them present to [...]
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
NOTE: Deadline is approaching on October 31st for presenting to the Angel Forum on November 22, 2004. See “Angel Forum” notes below. October 25, 2004: Investor Ready 101 Seminar From their website: Open to anyone, this seminar (not a workshop) will help emerging entrepreneurs seeking seed and expansion equity to understand the motivations and expectations [...]
Portland Indymedia (pdximc) has a long and interesting post on the ecological costs of shifting from fossil fuels to biodiesel in particular that is very interesting. In short, it states that we use 1 billion gallons of fossil fuel per day and that we only generate 1.5 billion gallons of vegetable oil per year. He [...]
Here is Martin’s brief overview of the most important themes that are coming out at the Web 2.0 conference. In short, he says that the most prevalent themes seem to be: • the web is moving towards being a platform for computers and humans, not just humans; • search has a long way to go; [...]
I am in the camp of people who think that nanotech will not be a “market” but that it will influence all other existing markets instead. Sure, there will be a market for nano-tech tools but even those will be broken out into vertical market toolsets and technologies so textile manufacturers will not be buying [...]
Fast Company has a brief article on the rise of social entrepreneurship and how that is being reflected in the courses that are being designed at the various MBA programs. QUOTE: More young people “want to make money and produce profits, but they want their work to have meaning and a social mission.” As awareness [...]
Here is yet another example of the nano-bio convergence that is happening, although this time it is the disciplines themselves physically converging in a new research facility. This can only help accelerate the interesting developments between the two sciences.
On Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 at Science World, the Vancouver Enterprise Forum held its first session of the new school-year. The first session is always about early stage capital and this year was no exception. While the general topic was the same as usual, there were some interesting highlights which I have noted here: Aileen [...]
Sure it would be nice to have a googlebajillion MIP processor or some nano-opto-electronics to speed up your internet connection or a petabyte of storage on your keychain fob but these people are working on something that REALLY matters: odor-killing socks.
I like this blog post titled “Take a cookie when they’re passed” from my new favourite blog at Joe Krause’s Bnoopy Blog. He discusses the serendipitous chain of events that started with a book that his girlfriend gave him and eventually led to Vinod Khosla funding Excite 18 months later. Fun read and I’m sure [...]
This fall is shaping up to be a busy one for those technology companies seeking opportunities to learn about or acquire some funding. Here is an incomplete list of events sorted by date. I will update this list as dates firm up. September 21, 2004: VIATeC (Victoria): Strategies for Succesfully Raising Money Financing a company [...]
Rocketbuilders is a Vancouver, BC, Canada based management consulting firm specializing in helping technology firms identify and capitalize on market opportunities. They were commissioned to do a study on commercialization best practices by the NRC and ASI in Spring of 2004. Dave Thomas, Reg Nordman, and Geoff Hansen were the key authors of the study, [...]
I am thrilled to see Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the premier Valley VC firms, has launched his own blog. One of his recent posts discusses the very ideas that I mentioned in my blog-defining first post – namely that the next 20 years (2005-2025) will bring the same amount of change [...]
VCs are frequently compared to lemmings or sheep, both metaphors describing their tendency to operate in herds and to all run towards one type of business or another relatively in sync. SiliconValley.com is covering this season’s popular fundees – social software companies. More here. For those who don’t know, we have our very own home-grown [...]
This short blurb appeared over at Good Morning Silicon Valley and was written by John Paczkowski. It is short and refers to a Wall Street Journal article (that requires a subscription) so I have quoted it here in full. This person HAS to be hating the fact that her colleague chose Option B. But how [...]
I have gone back and looked at the data available from the Canadian Venture Capital Association and Macdonald & Associates to get a sense of the big picture for VC financings here in Canada. (Any errors are mine and not the fault of CVCA or M&A.) Here is the big picture from 1995-2003: It looks [...]
There are a couple of angel forums in Vancouver, places where entrepreneurs can go to pitch their business idea directly to angels (high-net-worth individuals who invest their own money in startups). One of them is the Angel Forum run by Bob Chaworth-Musters, the other is VanTec, the VEF Angel Technology Network, which is coordinated by [...]
It’s Deja vu all over again. Renewable energy seems to be the topic of the day. Some odd combination of forces are driving interest in renewable energies (many of the things that I discussed in my previous posting on bioproducts). The web is cluttered with noise about bioproducts, solar energy, and other non-petroleum based energy [...]
The 2004 Q2 Price Waterhouse Coopers / Venture Economics / Venture Capital Association Moneytree Survey numbers are out. I posted on this in July but hadn’t put in the graphs and haven’t had time until now. I always find quarter-to-quarter comparisons too granular and lacking in context so I have taken the liberty of extracting [...]
Everything old is new again. It’s all about timing. These are only two of a few choice phrases that may describe something that is afoot here in British Columbia. Some major global, national, and provincial forces are in play that are driving the development of a new (to us) association that may be created in [...]
I love Craig Venter for his long view, his burning curiousity, and his adventurous spirit. And probably because he pisses so many people off in the scientific community for being a dilletante. And yet, he has done more for the development of the various *omics (genomics, proteomics) than almost all others to date. This article [...]
