metarand

Chomping At The Bit: How To Find iPhone Apps

Australian serial entrepreneur Ben Keighran is starting to make waves in Silicon Valley again with his new venture Chomp. With fellow Aussie co-founder Cathy Edwards and funding from Ron Conway, Blue Run Ventures and other Valley notables the business is aimed at enabling iPhone users to find apps.

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

Tags: Ben Keighran, Cathy Edwards, Chomp, Robert Scoble

How To Successfully Pitch Angel Investors

Last week Innovation Bay Angels met for their quarterly dinner to hear pitches from a chosen few entrepreneurs. This was the fourth dinner of the year, a year in which we’ve assessed over 50 Australian companies and by the end of the evening we had heard live pitches from 14 entrepreneurs seeking angel investment this year.

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!

Tags: Angel Investing, angels, Innovation Bay

Techcrunch Disrupt: Livestreaming (Conference Over)

Tags: Techcrunch Disrupt

The Intention Web: Social Business Designed

Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group explains the Intention Web as being about information that provides explicit predictions of who will do what next, although it’s not happened yet.

From his perspective, this forward-looking or anticipation network will provide three unique opportunities:

1.People can now use their social relationships that have similar goals or events on a calendar and improve their experience

2. They can also identify who in their social circles are most likely going where, increasing their knowledge of top events

3. This provides businesses with the ability to listen to provide highly contextualized offerings and experiences for those explicitly stating their intents.

As enterprise increasingly integrates social business design principles, I expect them to formulate strategies for tapping into the growing intention network. These strategies will include ways to identify true intent, reward those who broadcast their intent and generally make  this data actionable.

Jeremiah has provided a list of intention enabled sites including:

*  43 Things, a wish list; and

* Plancast, which allows users to publish their future plans.

I want to talk about another intention enabled site called Sponty.  Boston based, the company uses the tagline ‘be hangoutable’ and bills itself as allowing users to create and discover social activity feeds around them. Users create topical feeds that tell others about fun things happening around town, like indie music and hipster parties.

According to co-founder, Mahmoud Arram, Sponty’s premise is that while location is important, the type of the activity and which of your friends are going is the determining factor whether to go to something. Sponty let’s people broadcast their social intentions so that their friends can join them.

He believes the power is in user created topical event feeds. People may be able to tweet events, but tweets are not actionable; in the sense that you cannot click “I’m down” on a tweet to let the organizer/friend know that you’re going and see who else is going.

Mahmoud sees Sponty as being laser focused on events. “Think of it as real-time intentions, rather than real-time statuses”.

He agrees that game mechanics is an essential element and they are exploring ways to build an incentive system for people to share and contribute their topical event feeds. Currently, the top users feel rewarded when they help people go out and discover an event they probably would not have known about otherwise.

Using Twitter as an analogy and stepping back in time 12 to 18 months, it is not hard to see the power within the intention web. Especially for businesses who are able to tap into what will be a growing arena in 2010.

Tags: 43 Things, Altimeter Group, Jeremiah Owyang, Plancast, Sponty, Twitter

US Leads The Way With New Office For Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Bloomberg reports that the US Commerce Department is in the process of establishing a new Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation to help entrepreneurs transform ideas into companies.

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!

Tags: Commonwealth Commercialisation Institute, Office for Entrepreneurship & innovation

Acquisition Is The New Black – Is The Entrepreneurial Economy Back

Has anyone else noticed this trend of late? It appears as if corporate acquisitions have become the new black.

Nokia, for example, have acquired Bit-Side, Cellity and Plum so far this year. The Finnish mobile company is now reportedly targeting the London-based travel social network Dopplr.

After a hiatus, Google is also back in the M&A game. CEO, Eric Schmidt told Reuters Television:

“Acquisitions are turned on again…and we are doing our normal maneuvers, which is small companies. My estimate would be one-a-month acquisitions and these are largely in lieu of hiring.”

Google acquired On2 Technologies last month and reCAPTCHA last week. MeetTheBoss has a subway-style map of the company’s acquisitions (thanks TechCrunch) – this may prove useful if you are trying to figure out their M&A strategy.

After a break of almost a year, Adobe turned on the spigot last month with the acquisition of start up Australian hosting and ecommerce company, Business Catalyst. They then fronted up for a billion dollar deal by acquiring Omniture, a web analytics business.

How can we forget Oracle’s billion dollar acquisition of Sun Microsystems last month.

Microsoft’s only acquisition so far this year has been BigPark, a Canadian interactive gaming company. Before this deal they had last made an acquisition this time last year.

IBM has kept up a steady pace in recent months acquiring Exeros Assets, a data discovery software company in May, both statistical analysis software developer SPSS and source code analysis company Ounce Labs in July and Singapore-based analytics and optimisation business Red Pill Solutions this week.

So, what does this mean for entrepreneurs and their financial backers?

Investors typically focus as much on the potential exit as they do on the team, the technology and the market when they are deciding whether to bring a company into their portfolio. Knowing that the corporate development VPs are once again actively scouting for deals for their companies will be comforting to venture capitalists and their limited partners. They will become more active in growing their portfolios again.

As a result the entrepreneurial economy or ecosystem will be sufficiently lubricated to begin grinding its gears and tending towards a state of equilibrium.

Tags: acquisitions, Adobe, Eric Schmidt, Google, IBM, Microsoft

Innovation Bay: Summer Angel Investor Dinner

I’m really pleased to announce that, together with my Innovation Bay co-founders, I’m hosting a Summer Angel Investor Dinner on the 6th October in Sydney.

Our June dinner  was totally oversubscribed. We had a huge demand from entrepreneurs wanting to pitch their ventures to our group, who included some of Australia’s and the world’s most successful and connected businesspeople.

It’s also really great to point to a success story from the June event. One of the companies that pitched – Posse – secured four new investors from this session and has gone on to launch in the US and UK. They are growing gangbusters and acknowledge the invaluable advice they’ve received from Innovation Bay and its members.

I expect the October event will be no different. We are currently screening potential demo companies so ping me asap if you are interested in being considered.

There is absolutely no cost to entrepreneurs for pitching at the dinner. Our only challenge is that we need to limit the number of companies pitching so be quick!

Chris Sacca: How to spell VC in lowercase

Former Google Head of Strategic Initiatives, Chris Sacca is following up on his 20 or so personal investments with the formation of a new early stage venture fund.

To be named Lowercase Capital, this new $5m fund is perhaps a reminder to all venture capitalists that they are service providers first and foremost and as such should look at themselves in the lower case.

Notably an investor in Omnisio, Photobucket and Twitter, I look forward to seeing what else Chris finds interesting out there.

[via TechCrunch]

Tags: Chris Sacca, lowercase capital

Innovation Bay Pitches In, Entrepreneurs Plate Up

Last night I hosted a fun Angel Dinner together with my Innovation Bay co-conspirators. Ross Dawson has covered the event most admirably – check out his blog post of the event. I’d like to thank those who attended: the entrepreneurs who stepped up to the plate and gave excellent pitches, NICTA for sponsoring, Table for Twenty for their excellent service, but most of all, Phaedon Stough and Ian Gardiner for pulling it all together on top of their busy day jobs.

As Ross mentioned we had someone from the Federal Department of Innovation introduce the group to the Commonwealth Commercialisation Institute. That someone was Donna Valenti and I am most grateful to her for making the trek down from Canberra.

I’d asked Donna to come along as a way to kickstart a dialogue around what the formula for success should be for the CCI. They are in a process of consulting the start up community and it was good to have her share their current thinking.

The key questions for me, with respect to the CCI are: How best can the Australian tech community (in its broadest sense – ICT, bio, nano – researchers, entrepreneurs, investors etc) leverage this incredible opportunity to ensure Australia punches well above its current commercialisation weight? What precedents exist that we can point to, what are the measures of success and how can the Government adequately gauge sufficient economic, social and other ROI for its decision to deploy $196m initially and then around $80m annually? And finally, how can we create an environment in which entrepreneurial magic happens, continuously?

As you can imagine, I have some strong thoughts about these questions, but I’d very much like to hear your thoughts and aspirations – in an ideal world without constraints, how would you envisage the CCI unfolding?

I’d also like to hear from folks, especially in Silicon Valley, who have thoughts around how best to leverage up the current funding for the Institute so that it extends the ramp further for Australian start ups.

Tags: CCI, Commonwealth Commercialisation Institute, Innovation Bay

Startup Lesson No.1: Make Your Own Path

Last evening I had the absolute privilege of being a judge in the Creative Sydney Back My Project initiative. Chosen from a deep pool of applicants eight finalists duked it out on stage in front of a packed room at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the background the Opera House flickered through a panoply of colours, exuding the freshness and vibrancy of Sydney and the mood of the crowd. On stage the pressure was on.

With just four minutes to present, the teams acquitted themselves extremely well and after taking questions from us judges the audience got to applaud for their favorite while we adjourned to deliberate. It didn’t take us long to realise a clear favorite had emerged from the crowd as the applause was deafening for one of the finalists.

Us judges didn’t know who this was, and independently we concurred with them – there was a clear winner. The team, Soapbox Project, had both wowed the room and for us judges we felt they would be able to achieve the most impact from the prize we could award them.

It was a great evening and especially gratifying for me to see the raw entrepreneurial and creative energy unleashing itself in this most wonderful of cities.

Now on to the topic of my heading. Every one of those finalists had one thing in common. A strong desire to carve their own way, a desire to be different, a desire not to follow the herd. This is the key trait required to be a true entrepreneur – and it is demonstrated most beautifully in the following video.

Keep watching. Keep doing:

[Via andrewg]

Tags: backmyproject, creativesydney