Chomp has received some solid coverage on TechCrunch and an interview with Robert Scoble (embedded below) in which Ben explains their value proposition:

As active angel investors (the group has invested multi millions of dollars to date), we see a lot of deals in different contexts and one thing we value above all is a quality pitch from entrepreneurs who are passionate and who have done their homework on their industry.

Our modus has been to ask entrepreneurs to submit an initial 90-second video pitch. That may not seem like a lot of time, but remember that most television ads only run for 29 seconds!

Those entrepreneurs who are chosen to actually present to the group at the quarterly dinners are given six minutes to pitch and may answer questions from the room for another six minutes.

Why all these time constraints and formats?

We’ve tried the unstructured, open ended approach and it simply does not work. Anyone can bang together a business plan or executive summary on a word processor and make it look good – but getting a message across via video in 90 seconds takes skill.

Standing in front of a room of 40 successful businesspeople and selling a business in six minutes takes further skill, discipline and practice.

Besides, investors have only so much bandwidth to hear from an individual entrepreneur and rattling on for 15 – 20 minutes won’t solidify your investment case, nor would it be fair on others who also want to garner the group’s attention.

What should your video be aiming to achieve?

One of the best comments made recently by one of our angels sums this up succintly:

“Short, sharp, punchy. Gives enough to establish credentials. There is enough in this quick summary to make me want to found our more.”

The videos we receive are placed on a private forum and members of the group are able to ask questions of the entrepreneurs who submitted them, and they have the ability to respond. From these comments (for the last round there were well over 300 comments) and the questions asked at the dinners, we’ve collated a set of Frequently Asked Questions, which I’ve set out below.

Entrepreneurs should know the answers to as many of these as possible and while they may not be able to cover off on each and every one in their videos, we would expect them to do so by the time they finish their six minute pitch.

THE ANGEL FAQs

PROBLEM/SOLUTION
How big is the problem you are trying to solve

What is your core value proposition

MARKET/CUSTOMERS
What is your customer make up – geographically and by industry

What is the return on investment (ROI) for customers

Can you give a bottom up outline of the market size rather than “a % of a $bn market”

How do you define your target segment, how many potential customers are there in this segment and what are they willing to pay for your product or service

What is the cost to acquire customers

If you are initially targeting a niche of early adopters, how will you get across to mass market adoption

Are there any regulatory or entrenched business practice barriers you need to overcome

Is there something about your space that means we need a local solution rather than a modified US solution

Are there any analogies you can use to explain your product, eg “the Farmville of Health Education” or “Groupon meets Zynga”

If you are initially targeting a niche of early adopters, how will you get across to mass market adoption

Are there any regulatory or entrenched business practice barriers you need to overcome

COMPETITION
What is your sustainable competitive advantage

Which are your major competitors and what do you do different

Not for everyone but: why are you best placed to win in this torturously overcrowded and undifferentiated space

While your product may in fact be different from others in the market, how do you get around the perception that it is the same as other products out there

TEAM/THE BUSINESS
Who owns the IP

Who will be on the team for executing

What are your views on the LeanStartup Model

What are the backgrounds of the founders

What is your backstory – how did you come to tackle this problem/market

Does your product exist already – if so, will you be able to demo it

BUSINESS MODEL
Outline some key figures – revenue predictions, staff

How do you make money, what is your revenue model

What is your distribution strategy

Are revenues primarily from product or services. How will that change in the future.

What are your plans for scaling the business (what are the requirements and obstacles to scale)

How are/will you handle the huge amounts of data that you need to gather

THE FUNDING NEED
How will you spend the money

What your investors should contribute in addition to money

THE DEAL
How much equity are you offering to Angels

What will equity split be

EXIT STRATEGY
What’s your exit strategy

One final point – don’t go asking investors to sign a non disclosure agreement. You’ll likely get short shrift.

I hope these pointers assist you in your quest for funding and good luck growing your businesses!

If you haven’t factored this into your business yet, you’re already on the endangered list!

That’s why I wanted to share with you his talk at Stanford University last month. In it he talks about how people like Scott Monty are humanizing the brands they work with, how new Zappos employees are forced to tweet to connect them to their brand and the concept of doubling pennies.

He finishes in true Scoble style with an understated truism – we all have a burning desire not to connect with thousands of ‘friends’ that we hardly know, but with just four people, the right four people…and that is all it takes to change the world, just four connected, passionate people.

Connect the dots – the right four people who have cracked the formula for building doubling pennies – an extremely powerful combination.

Definitely worth watching:

This office, according to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, will help fledgling business owners get training, credit and access to government research, in a bid to encourage the ‘right kind’ of risks by business leaders.

The office will be geared toward the first step in the business cycle: moving an idea from somebody’s imagination or from a research lab into a business plan. What we need to do is get better at connecting the great ideas to the great company builders.

Bloomberg notes that this plan is picking up the ball from Barack Obama’s comments a few days ago that new technologies and businesses are the key to re-establishing economic growth…The administration will try to ‘catalyze breakthrough’ technologies.

What I find really interesting here is that this rhetoric echoes the Australians who announced in May that they would be creating a Commercialisation Institute. I put forward a paper in July on how I believe such an initiative can optimally assist entrepreneurs and boost innovation.

However, we are still waiting to get a feel from Canberra that something is actually being done beyond the rhetoric. I hope that this US initiative is able to achieve a catalytic breakthrough in Australia too by showing up their tardiness in getting stuff done!

The other interesting echo is that Gary Locke points to the United States’ failure in capitalizing on its solar technologies. Similarly, Australia was a world leader in this area with technology developed in Sydney. Today this is being commercialised in China. Carpe diem, my friends!

A real life example is the RepRap movement. A group of people have come together to develop an open source 3-d printer that can replicate itself. Check out the video below:

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

A core premise behind the piece is that in an IPO and acquisition-starved market, the math of billion dollar VC funds doesn’t add up. Enter the traditional, venture capital as cottage industry style fund – smaller, leaner, more agile and definitely more entrepreneurial, similar in nature to the people it invests in and both able to identify with and nuture successful entrpreneurs.

It’s a good article and well worth the read.

I am witnessing somewhat of a shake up in the VC industry in Australia at the moment as well. Together with two partners, I’ve been running Innovation Bay since November 2003. At the time I was an early stage VC and there were a number of other players in the market. Over the next 5 and a half years though, the VC industry has gone through some major contractions. The number of active VCs has totally shrunk, yet the demand for capital and savvy advice has continued to rocket.

Fast forward to mid 2009. Innovation Bay is hosting a new format event on the 9th June. We are putting on an Angel Dinner for a select subset of our members, many of whom easily fall within the BusinessWeek rubric of ‘super angels’.

We are inviting along two technology entrepreneurs to pitch their ventures. I’ve been truly amazed at the number and talent of the entrepreneurs who have approached us with a view to being chosen. The hardest part for me is that I’d love to have them all along, but alas we have to limit the numbers for this event.

The demand, though, does point to a real need in Australia and I am hopeful that the newly announced Commonwealth Commercialisation Institute will play a major role in satisfying this demand.

I am also going to be a judge in a pitching competition for creative projects called Back My Project. It is part of the Creative Sydney festival of ideas and has a pool of cash behind it. Come along to the MCA on the 4th June if you are in Sydney – it will be loads of fun. It is all part of Vivid Sydney, the “biggest international music and light festival in the Southern Hemisphere”!