I’ll be moderating another SVASE VC Breakfast Club meeting this Thursday, Dec 21st in San Francisco. As usual, it’s an informal round-table where 10 entrepreneurs get to deliver a pitch, then answer questions and get critiqued by a VC Partner. We’ve had VC’s from Draper Fisher, Hummer Winblad, Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Mohr Davidow, Emergence Capital …etc.
These sessions are a valuable opportunity for Entrepreneurs, most of whom would probably have a hard time getting through the door to VC Partners. Since I’ve been through quite a few of these sessions, both as Entrepreneur and Moderator, let me share a few thoughts:
- It’s a pressure-free environment, with no Powerpoint presentations, Business Plans…etc, just casual conversation; but it does not mean you should come unprepared!
- Follow a structure, don’t just roam about what you would like to do, or even worse, spend all your time describing the problem, without addressing what your solution is.
- Don’t forget “small things” like the Team, Product, Market..etc.
- It would not hurt to mention how much you are looking for, and how you would use the funds…
- Write down and practice your pitch, and prepare to deliver a compelling story in 3 minutes. You will have about 5, but believe me, whatever your practice time was, when you are on the spot, you will likely take twice as long to deliver your story. The second half of your time-slot is Q&A with the VC.
- Bring an Executive Summary; some VC’s like it, others don’t.
- Last, but not least, please be on time! I am not kidding… some of you know why I even have to bring this up. (Arriving an hour late to a one-and-a-half-hour meeting is NOT acceptable.)
Thursday’s featured VC is Scott Chou, General Partner, Gabriel Venture Partners. For details and registration please see the SVASE site. In appreciation of our 40% growth in membership during 2006, we are pleased to offer SVASE members free registration for VC Breakfast Club during December. Non-members will be able to register at the substantially discounted rate of $25.
The above promotion brings up an issue: it’s easy to register for free events – please only do it if you really mean to attend. The registration system closes at 10 participants, depriving other entrepreneurs of the opportunity to join. (No walk-ins allowed). So if you need to cancel, please notify us by email.
(Update: The event has sold out. We can not accomodate more participants, if you’re not on the list, please do not just show up – join us next year).
Here’s a participating Entrepreneur’s feedback about a previous event.
See you in San Francisco!
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I’ve been unable to access Reddit for three days now. I doubt it’s a major outage, as nobody seems to complain about it. A Boston-based friend reported not being able to reach it for a day, but then it came back normal. 
The reddit team feels “confident, however, that because we do not collect any personal information from our users, the ability to do harm with the data that was taken is greatly reduced.” However, since userid, password and email data are compromised, they are warning anyone who uses the same credentials at other sites to change it all. 
(Updated)
). Clearly, the majority of new IE7 users are not IE6 upgraders, they came from the Firefox camp.
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