Entrepreneurship & Fundraising

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Entrepreneurship & Fundraising

View more presentations from Ariel Poler

16 Finalists, 3 Winners of the IsraelStartupNetwork Pitch Fest 2011

"Hi, Everyone,
Below you will find some basic information about the 16 finalists at our recent Pitch Fest, sponsored by Blumberg Capital, and hosted by Shiluvim. The first three are the winners, who were each awarded a very unique prize - every startup’s dream - a Due Diligence Process with Blumberg, which has already begun. The remaining 13 companies are listed in alphabetical order. Contact details have been provided. As you will see, these exciting startups cover a wide range of industries, reflecting the nature of our group. Over the coming weeks, we will be dedicating individual posts to each of these companies, as well as to many others among the 65 who applied to present.
All the best, and see you at our next event!
Arlene Marom"

Read here full story by Arlene Marom

Generating High Growth Innovation Hubs

Chile 1208 generating innovation hubs 2010

View more presentations from steve blank.

Read full story Creating the Next Silicon Valley – The Chilean Experiment

Do not care about business plan, care about business model

[ By Steve Blank Woodstock for Entrepreneurs – the Startup Lessons Learned Conference ]

Why accountants don’t run startups

If you wanted to know what I’ve been thinking about after Customer Development, you can see and hear it in the talk I gave at the conference. Watch the expanded version of “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups below.
- The first story, Shifts in Entrepreneurship starts at 4:20
- Not All Startups Are Equal starts at 7:30
- What VC’s Don’t Tell You starts at 12:00
- Business Plans Versus Business Models at 14:08
- Startups Search Companies Execute at 17:05
- Leadership Versus Management at 24:50
- Durant Versus Sloan at 30:13
- E-School Versus B-School at 33:41

View more presentations from Steve Blank.

The New Face Of Venture Capital

[ By Kevin Lawton from TrendCaller ]

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Raising Venture Capital - More Tips ...

[ By OnStartups ]

There’s already lots of great content on the web about raising capital and understanding deal terms. My favorite is the content on Venture Hacks (a must read, if you’re raising capital). But, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to share some of the “lessons learned” from my own experiences. Some of these you’ve probably heard before, but one or two will likely be new to you

Read here full story 9 Quick Tips Learned While Raising $33 Million In Venture Capital

Genieo closes $3 m. in seed funding

[ By israel21c.org ]

Genieo Innovation of Israel, creators of the ultimate home-page personalization engine, announced early this month the closing of US $3 million in seed funding.

Backed by leading private investors, the company is bringing to market the industry's first fully automatically updated and micro behavioral-targeted (MBT) personalized home-page. "Our technology transforms a homepage into a personal assistant" says Miss Sol Tzvi, founder and CEO of Genieo ...

Read here full story - Genieo closes $3 m. in seed funding

What is the right age to found venture ...?

[by Vivek Wadhwa - TechCrunch ]

Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40. We also learned that these founders are likely to be married and have two or more kids. They typically have six to ten years of work experience and real-world ideas. They simply got tired of working for others and wanted to rise above their middle-class heritage...

Read here full story - When It Comes To Founding Successful Startups, Old Guys Rule

A tool for building your Elevator Pitch

Avner Ronen of Boxee on unpacking the way we consume TV

In this interview, Avner discusses the future of TV, the importance of interface design to building a successful product and why Sacha Baron Cohen might be a likely candidate to transform the media’s approach to online.

Want to get funding? It’s all about research

[By Chris Morris, Entrepreneur Corner]

Video interview: Wendy Lea has worked as a bootstrap entrepreneur, corporate executive, and angel investor over the last 25 years. She joined GetSatisfaction.com as CEO in February. Lea is also the founder of The Chatham Group and an angel investor. Of particular interest to entrepreneurs are her thoughts on what she looks for when deciding where to invest and her advice for entrepreneurs who are looking for start-up capital (about 2 minutes into the clip).

Continue here...

In continue to previous post...

[By holyexposures.com]

At the meeting we heard from one VC, Blumberg Capital, who specializes in seed round investments of internet companies.
The partner of the firm who spoke, Bruce Tarragin, said that they were closing a deal in Tel Aviv now, and had already closed another deal earlier this quarter.

The Capital Market Bulls Return
There had been several months, since last October, with virtually no dealflow that was actually leading to investment. Now, there seems to be a reawakening of the capital markets. The negative sentiment of the market has been replaced with a feeling that we have already reached bottom, and now there are good ideas out there that are worthy of investment.


Continue here Israel Economy for Start Ups – Signs of Improvement

Sell High, Buy Low: Israeli Start Ups Get Funded

[By VCCafe.com]

Despite the exit drought, more Israeli start ups have reported to recieve venture rounds from the last 60 days. You’ll notice the common thread: lots of private investor involvement and almost always participation of the previous investors as well.

Read more: >>>

10 steps to catch VC cash

[By CNN Money]

Looking for funding for your big idea? Follow our 10-point guide to landing the right investors.


"The entrepreneur is the Pied Piper of a company," says Chip Hazard, general partner at Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners. "We want an articulate, passionate CEO who can excite others - employees, customers, business partners."
Flybridge joined the syndicate that backed Goby Technologies, a Boston-based search startup that provides comprehensive leisure and travel information in a single site - first with a seed round to build a prototype, then with a multimillion-dollar Series A round to fund longer-term operations. >>>

Why things goes wrong?

Start-up, or any other business beginning – is a hard under pressure work, very limited in time frame, so only highly professionally crew have chances to success. Therefore looking back to my personal experience, - I think it is safer to go into business with a work colleague than with a friend. Even you know what you're getting in to - starting a business with a mate may sound like a good idea, but some-time better is just stay friends and save yourself a lot of heartbreak.

I like to share with you excellent article with a lot of useful information packed in - Starting up with a friend (What could possibly go wrong?) by Daniel Tenner.

* Make your agreements explicit so that you don’t break implicit promises
* Detail your agreements so that your promises are clear
* Don’t be afraid of discussing negative scenarios, so that you don’t add the stress of misunderstanding to already bad situations
* Write things down so you’ll remember
* Don’t make things work at all costs, so that you don’t spend the next years living with a deal that’s not acceptable to you
* Don’t assume things will get better with time, so you’re not surprised when they don’t

Making resume, I like to point - whether you going to start new venture or just some web-project/service, - make sure you have a mutually agreed upon, objectively measurable set of criteria for success. And most important point is to write everything down. Regularly measure yours, individual performance and the corporate performance against those criteria to avoid unexpected situations and surprises.

Any business idea, relation between friends, colleagues, clients etc, should be written down also to avoid misunderstanding in the future.

If only I'd read this article before I started my first business, I could have avoided many problems and a lot of stress. I hope someone else does find it useful in their own endeavors.

Web 2.0 Summit 08

Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco (5-7 November 2008):

The commercial web is now a teenager—it's been fifteen short years since Marc Andreessen released the Mosaic browser. To put this in perspective, television as a commercial medium reached its fifteenth birthday in 1956—the year Elvis Presley made his first appearance on national TV. National news broadcasts were still in their infancy, "As The World Turns" debuted as America's first half-hour soap opera, and "The Price Is Right" began its dominance of the game show genre.

A Conversation with Shai Agassi (Better Place) by Tim O`Reilly - from electric cars platform developing to SAP ex-position ... and back to cars ...




But most I've liked "World Map" from Silicon Valley point of view represented by Rebecca MacKinnon (Global Voices).



Check out all the Web 2.0 Summit highlights, - you can find them here.

Special thanks to blip.tv

Jeff Pulver again in Tel-Aviv

Yesterday, 30/10/2008 Jeff came back to Tel-Aviv. So, welcome home Jeff… to Holy land…

During my visit I will have a cameo role on the Israeli TV show “Mesudarim.” Mesudarim is the Israeli version of “Entourage.” I am pretty excited about this. :)

When I’m not at any of these events, chances are that I will be in a hotel lobby meeting with (early) early stage startups. At the moment I have about 27 such meetings scheduled. While my meeting schedule for this trip is now fully booked, if any friends are aware of an interesting hi-tech Israeli startups that I should know about, please feel free to send me a message and I will setup a meeting during a future visit.

Looks like "I have missed train"... Anyway I will ask him for meeting during next visit.

More detailed schedule of Jeff Pulver visit you can find on his blog.

Knowing better people around you

While midnight web-surfing and scanning the "Tel Aviv-Yafo Entrepreneur Meetup Group" members profiles, I have found a lot of interesting people, blogs they manage, services some of them provides. Some contacts made for our new venture needs. With my pleasure I am going to share information, which may be interesting for local startup entrepreneurs. Of course it is hard to announce all of them in one single post, but I like to mention some of them, other may be disclosed in later posts.

So, via Boris Nadion's profile I have found that he is the member of small group of 3 (together with Vitaly Kushner and Michael Mazyar) software developers with an impressive list of tools and technologies, named Astrails.
– Tel-Aviv based web consultancy. I liked their last project – BitWine- beta release of web-service which helps

"find skilled professionals in various areas such as Technology, Nutrition, Travel, Relationship, Parenting etc, get to know them in an informal setting, and enjoy their consultation from the comfort of your home".

- service added to my blog "Cofee shops" list – startups and projects I found interesting.

In Liat Vardi's profile I have figured out women driven community for women entrepreneurs. She also has own blog, - informative resource, not only for women's… :-)
I recommend to visit "Venture Capitals" category of her blog with several interviews with representatives of some local VC funds.

- Exploring Carmel Ventures I have found a few coming events, one of them may be very attractive for entrepreneurs - Internet & Media StartUpScale on November 11, 2008, so update your calendars.


And the last for today announce about Garage Geeks, found via "Carmel Venture"- strongly recommended...

Physical & virtual space for multi-disciplinary creative people to meet, innovate and build non-commercial projects that would otherwise may not come to life.

Thats all for today, hope you liked it.

Salute,
Fabian

New venture looking for...

Israel based new venture, focused on dynamic market of Ultra Mobile Personal Computers (UMPC), with an innovative patent-pending concept looking for:

- Consultant with experience in field of Industrial Engineering of PC peripheral Electronic devices

- Angel Investor for first funding round - seed stage.
(Presentation and small video demo showing the concept highlights are available)

You can leave your comments/contact information here or to e-mail: contact@reverseface.com