As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked veteran technology executive and angel investor Ron Weissman to share his thoughts on how startups can overcome the challenges of securing early-stage financing. This is the first of his commentaries and we welcome your comments.
By Ron Weissman
Why do some first-time CEOs find it hard to get to first base with investors? The product story that CEOs want to tell has often little to do with the business story that investors need to hear before they will invest. Product- or engineering-driven CEOs new to the VC world beg, “Please let me demo my product! It will change the world. For $500,000 you will own a piece of the next Facebook.”
But the story that investors need to hear is different. “How does your business work? How will you scale to become a profitable market leader? Is this the kind of business that meets my investors’ financial objectives?”
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Thank you for being with us for the fourth month of our new blog. Although a bit late, here is a recap of our posts from May in case you missed them, beginning with, in chronological order, the latest installments in our ongoing series on getting technology to market, The Commercialization Ecosystem, which covered a great swath of topics including government and education’s role in the startup ecosystem, cultures of risk, intellectual property, sustainable viable products and other pearls of wisdom.
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, David French, a senior Canadian patent attorney with 35 years of experience, now provides the fourth of his commentaries on the importance to a company of protecting its intellectual property.
By David French
In a previous post, I talked about the importance of having an IP Coordinator on the team and how this role fits into an organization. Part of the responsibilities of such an individual is to ensure that a company is obtaining value when it pays to patent its inventions. I identified the three principles that apply if the objective is to obtain meaningful patents:
- Right invention
- Right circumstances
- Right procedures
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By Alexandra Reid
I am a fortunate community manager because I get to both write social media strategies and carry them through. This seamless process allows me to have a firm grip on the day-to-day online activities of our clients with the foresight to effectively steer these activities to reach long-term goals.
While it is beneficial to have a team of professionals that handle the areas of social media in which they are specialized, there are some major obstacles to this approach, especially for new ventures that do not have bottomless budgets to devote to the cause. For social media to be planned and carried out in house requires a dramatic reorganization of the departments that would handle the accounts (usually a battle between marketing and sales) as well as a huge commitment of time and resources. Alternatively, if you wish to outsource social media to a large agency, you run the risk of paying a small fortune for senior professionals to handle your accounts, while, unbeknownst to you, the bulk of the tasks are handed down to the juniors.
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This is the 19th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
Throughout this series, we have often referenced startup accelerators and the important role they play in the commercialization ecosystem, as well as where government support fits into the equation. So we thought it was time to take a closer look at these entities by profiling three different ones from Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.
We continue this week with TechStars, a mentorship-driven seed-stage investment program that operates three-month sessions in Seattle, Boulder, Boston and New York. We caught up with Nicole Glaros, managing director of TechStars Boulder, to talk about what has made the program successful, how it works and why it chose the cities it did in which to operate.
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By Ron Weissman
