Are You Fundable?

A short outline of our upcoming book. Feel free to share your thoughts.

ARE YOU FUNDABLE?

How to Measure and Improve Your Capital Quotient

The Entrepreneur’s PowerPitch Workshop Guide

by Alan Brody

What Makes Your Start-Up Different

Not all Start-Ups are the same. OK, you already knew that. But do you know what sets you apart in the minds of investors? Do you know how to turn that information to your advantage? 

Here are the key principles behind the PowerPitch Panel and our Start-Up events.

The objective is not necessarily to make you the best pitch on earth - it is to help you understand what it takes to be credible in the class of Start-up you are and then match you with the right source of funding.
 

Getting Into the Minds of Investors

The Start-Up Hierarchy: What Kind of Entrepreneur Are You?

The Hierarchy of Entrepreneurs

What is a Serial Entrepreneur? 

The Pedigreed Start-Up vs. Not-So Pedigreed (and how to fix that....)

Moonshots, Up-and-Comers and Career-Enders

How to look like a Serial Entrepreneur

The Older Player vs. The Youngest Player

         How Investors Rank Your Plan

How Deals & Ideas are Perceived

What kinds of deals investors are looking for? 

Idea-Driven Start-Ups vs. Sales-Driven vs. Customer-Driven Start-Ups

How to rank an Idea

How to rank an Investor

What Impresses Investors

What Terrifies Investors

Presentation

The Power of the Pitch

How to Pace your Pitch

The Secret to Pitching is the “3^rd Dimension” – the information between the lines 

Saying the Right Things – Avoiding the Wrong Things

Passion - what that really means

Burned by Angel – Why Inspiration only gets you so far…and could hurt you.

Who are Angel Investors?

The Basic Types of Angel Investors

Angel VCs

Angel Groups

Incubators/Accelerators

Private Angels

Friends and Family

Additional Chapters of the Book

The Fundability Test

Term Sheets

Corporate Structures

Alternate Funding

Additional Notes:

1. The Investors Private Vocabulary: Eskimos have 57 words to describe snow and the Bedouin have 100 for a camel. What terms do Investors have for entrepreneurs and why that matters?

2. Understand what investors are looking for - before you pitch.

3. The Secret to Pitching: the “3^rd Dimension”

4. The Jockey vs. the horse – the key to your future.

5. How to survive the drought.

6. Plan B: Do you Pivot or Deconstruct?

“Money Speaks” – Report from the Mobile Speech iBreakfast

Daniel Ziv, VP, Verint  *  Heath Ahrens, CEO, iSpeech 

Amy Neustein, Editor, Springer Series in Speech Tech  

 

The success of the iPhone's SIRI interface has taken a lot of voice recognition experts by surprise. Nevertheless, it is expected to open a lot of doors - and it may have created its own monster.

Speech recognition is a technology that has been brewing slowly sine the 1980s' but the combination of cloud computing, powerful smart phones and huge amounts of statistical voice data has been magical. Speech can be rapidly sent to a server where something like 3 gigs of RAM are allocated per speech processing session. The server then access massive amounts of statistical data to find just the right context for the question so that it can make better sense of the speech. They key word there is disambiguation - the better it understands the context the more accurate its understanding of your speech.

Since this has been developing quietly across the board, few insiders expected Apple to do so well with the iPhone 4S and SIRI. Now that it has, it has become a major marketing vehicle for Apple and their supplier, Nuance, has been in an acquisition mode that is either exciting or terrorizing the industry with patent suits.

The bigger issue is what happens when a technology - long considered a sideshow - moves to center stage? Who remembers that Symantec, the antiviral company started out as a natural language front-ended database? The critics loved the product but the public quickly became bored.

And now?

Companies like iSpeech, founded by Heath Ahrens, provide a Software Development Kit that enables any mobile or web developer to add a highly effective voice interaction component. Daniel Ziv of Verint, the company that is quietly behind the "this is being recorded for quality assurance" message you hear on customer assistance calls, showed what happened with these recordings. Those interactions are mined for clues about what customers really think. Customer Center calls tend to be the canary in the coal mine - the calls are where they show up first with their real feelings.

So, having a voice interaction is not only a CRM advantage, it is an invaluable source for mining true customer sentiment. It is so powerful that as Amy Neustein, the editor of the Springer Verlag Voice Tech series pointed out, you can determine mood and modify your message accordingly. It could also be used in a number of security-related applications.

In Verint's case, they can show how customer sentiment is reflected in key words that are not always obvious but when you know - watch out. For example, when a customer starts calling themselves a "customer" or even worse, "valued customer" there is a very high chance they are looking to fire your company. When they use the words "you people" - depending on the context - you just might want to call 911.

Bottom line: voice is here, it comes with a ton of psychology and it may be the gateway to a host of new product interfaces - each one with its own special set of rules and linguistic contexts. And if Nuance doesn't take over the world, you could still do what Apple did with surprisingly few resources and very little money.

TV GOES SOCIAL Report: Riding an ADD Medium?

TV GOES SOCIAL – The Take Home Report

From the TV GOES SOCIAL + 2nd Screen Summit at the Loews Santa Monica Feb. 22

The real issue of Social TV is managing an ADD environment. With as much as 60% of the TV audience holding a second screen in front of them, the issue is: can you make the two or more screens work together or are you simply providing the opportunity for distraction?

The conversation has moved from paralleling Tweets and Facebook fanposts to managing the relationships between multiple screens. This has implications for content, advertising and technology opportunities. One key word is Transmediea – storytelling that lives in a symbiotic relationship across 2 or more media.

TV GOES SOCIAL Panel

Social TV Networking

This matters because content has to be aware of the multiple environments in needs to live in – including mobile – where it may derive its audience and ideas. Ads have to live in the same environment which offers both challenges and amazing opportunities.

Since the second screen issue thrives on the quality of its relationship with the first screen, metadata and a variety of cross-communication technologies are major issues that have stakeholders - especially cable companies – deeply concerned.

Prediction: look out for Apple TV to be a game changer with a slew of competitors hoping to upstage them prior to 2103.

Report from STARTUPALOOZA NJ

122 attendees and 43 startups filled the NJIT Campus Center Atrium on February 9th for STARTUPALOOZA NJ hosted by The Enterprise Development Center at NJIT. With two minute pitches for innovations ranging from robots to electronic health record solutions, the disruptive power residing in NJ’s digital and healthcare community was once again proven. 6 finalists presented Digital finalists: Qrious, Allweb Technologies and My Venue Menu. Healthcare finalists: Vyzin, Epion Health and Assistive Innovations In presentations moderated by iBreakfast’s Alan Brody, they presented to investors including Kamran Hasmi, Heather Gilchrist, Zev Scherl (with protege Sam Scherl), Rick Pinto, Glenn Fratangelo and John Ason.

Congrats to the winners: Digital startup Qrious and healthcare firm Epion Health! Our thanks go to all attendees, exhibitors and investors as well as to Judith Sheft, Jerry Creighton and the hardworking staff of NJIT. Stay tuned for announcements of upcoming events and check out video coverage of three companies from yesterday’s StartupaloozaNJ that appears today in MedCity News  and click below for video coverage from our media sponsor NJorg

 

CLICK FOR VIDEOS

Social Media Weekend: Conference Overview

 

In our effort to keep you abreast of the most important conferences we bring you this report from our newest correspondent who is no other than....my daughter Danielle, a college sophomore and managing editor of the University of Delaware newspaper.

Here's what she learned from top people in the industry:

Facebook is a new tool for journalists, job hunting tips, blogging and how to use Twitter and LinkedIn the right way.

Top takeaways:
* Keep twitter professional, it’s business
* Show a specific focus in person and on Twitter & blogs
* Social media can be overwhelming, test new sites to see how they work for you before fully committing
* Spend time on blog posts and tweets, check grammar, use tags, links and pictures
* Keep your audience in mind when you’re active in social media, don’t bore them
* Showing your interests on social media gives you character, blogs don’t have to relate to your career.

Read here for additional coverage.

Gung Ho and the RFID Hunting Dogs of Virginia - Signs of our New Economy

Our year-end vacation took us off the beaten path down South where we had an epiphany of sorts about the new economy. Along the way, I read a book which explained that, although Gung Ho usually thought of as a Marine war cry bur it really is a Start-Up’s war cry. It was adopted by a Marine officer who was inspired by the determination of a very spirited guerilla entrepreneurial program in wartime China with that name!

(More about that later – but it may be the greatest irony of our economy that we used a Chinese idea to promote warfare and conquer who? while the Chinese used it to devastate our manufacturing base.)

We may also be so Social Media’d out in NY that we forget the potential for fundamental change occurring in the hinterland (OK I did see 3 people with Occupy Savannah signs, but they may have been leftover Yankees). So, I will give you a list of changes I saw that could outline our future…..you connect the dots.

1.      

1.    Factory building companies move from Chicago to South Carolina – because, said my engineer friend over dinner in GA “the South is the only place where factories are being build these days.” You can see a nice looking Honda plant from the highway when you drive through North Carolina. No signs promoting unions, plenty talking about the Bible.
2.    I meet two teachers looking to move to Ashland, N.C because they are virtual teachers working for the State of Florida. To save money, the Florida hired a group of ex-Disney execs to offer their troubled schools a low-cost alternative. The teachers are considering Ashland where costs are lower and the lifestyle pleasant. The schools may be good too.
3.   The country store talk in VA is about where to take their handheld transmitters in order to missing hunting dogs by locating the transponders. I hear that out West cattle herding is done from a laptop that sends signals out to cattle tags which lightly shock the cows into their pens.
4.   One of the fastest growing retail chains is a cheap tool supplier called Harbor Freight.
5.   All that shale gas fracking talk has inspired mineral searches in non-shale gas areas as well as a new fight over well water. Gold has been found in VA...
6.   I get 4G in the countryside – no problem.
7.  People love huntin’ and military bases seem to be just about everywhere. Is housing starting to come alive.
8.   No one talks about robots in farm mechanization but the farms are generally under 100 acres.....and you'd think......will returning solider use their newfound skills with predators and roadside robotics skills on the farms

9.   The point here is that the internet, social media and high tech are now entrenched in the heartland. For the most part, they are not used particularly innovatively. They are “paving the cowpath” – in other words doing traditional things but with better tech. The farmers complain about overregulation – our strawberries had to be tested for sweetness before they could be picked (they were still quite sour on FL) and wineries (yes there are wineries) can’t sell across state lines and so on…

We are still using an old state regulatory pre-internet infrastructure to govern while everywhere else they are bursting at the seams with tech and connectedness. Many regulations could be managed by online reputation and every consumer will have a 4G smartphone to keep them abreast. Yet, when states are desperate like Florida’s schools, they go virtual - no problem

As for innovation, we are sending factories down there because of unions and a supposed work ethic. Supposedly, rural people tend to value production more that urban people and are willing to do the repetitive work.

I can also add that the big Southern cities are mare diverse than you might have thought, but that is another story. The issue is, has the hinterland’s economy changed in a significant way due to the tech economy and the answer is probably no, not really. It’s doing the same only somewhat better.

But it could – and that’s where Gung Ho kicks in.

This is a long forgotten story that Marine connection has overshadowed. When the Japan occupied half of China in WWII, the free Chinese lost their major urban manufacturing and so the Communists and the Nationalists – a bipartisan group – launched a program of guerrilla manufacturing in the rural areas. They even threw in Angel money. Soon, small very nimble operators were making everything from soap and matchsticks to airplane parts in jungle factories that filled supplies, created jobs and kept the country going until it could take on the Japanese. Gung Ho is just an abbreviation for Chinese Industrial Cooperative or  "gōngyè hézuòshè" 工業合作社 shorted as " gōng hé" 工合 that coincidentally translates as “work together.”

The Communist revolution in China made us overlook this highly distributed form of manufacturing  which underwrote the revolution and then, when the dogma subsided, turned China into the manufacturing superpower it is today. [I write this on a China made PC, distributed through a China made router etc. etc.]

Whoever wants to win the next election should to revisit this story because it is the true source of our recovery. They should be underwriting exactly this kind of nimble manufacturing.

Sure, we are seeing some recovery but it tends to focused on big corporations that can make more money with fewer employees. In order to bring unemployment down we need to spark the creative abilities of agile, fast-changing highly informed low-cost specialty manufacturers. We have the connectedness, the high tech tools (designed here but made in China), the distributed education and the infrastructure to deliver. We need to foster the markets and get out of their way. With 50,000 or so returning troops that pressure but also the possibilities will increase. My guess is that our successes with unmanned flying will spark a revolution in robotics, remote control land & aerial technologies and a resurgence of mineralogical development.

Maybe they will remind their kin that hunting with dogs makes for lousy meat. All the excitement and fear sends adrenaline to the animals and the meat is soured. Wouldn't it be better if they found way to tag animals in the wild and then use to chips t lead them with a surprise?  

Anyone else been out in the country? I would like to compare notes!

PS There is nothing here that explain the mad crowds at Harry Potter World except to say that it is really well done, magical reality (read: cult marketing) is big and people will pay and suffer just to experience it…..

"Occupy" on Cover of Wired vs Our Town Hall Meeting

From our Town Hall meeting to this! Social Media nihilism.


We envisioned a self-organizing, people friendly group as in: Headless Body Seeks Topless Rule. However, at Wired it is: #Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You

To understand the phenomenon - more on it negative side - this article is a must read. So is the one in the same issue on the world's informal markets. They are unexpectedly linked.

The bottom line is that Social Media can either be "weaponized" or it can be an underlying force for the new economy. For that, see Marc Andreesen on Software Eating the World. 

Marc essay assumes everyone is on smartphones. The downside, as is widely pointed out - is the net loss of jobs and the rise of a new winner/loser economy that you typically see in "developing countries."

Fortunately, I have been travelling in the rural South where I have farm friends and I see the possibility of something quite different and for that, I ask you to read my next blog on the RFID hunting dogs and the real meaning of Gun Ho (its actually more of an entrepreneur's war cry - not a Marine slogan).