Best VC Blog: Don't Forget...

to cast your vote for your favorite VC blog on FastCompany. Ed and Jeff are actually providing suggestions (or should I say campaigning :-) as to who to vote for. Ed is also providing a list of usual suspects to which I would add Marc Goldberg (a close friend and former partner) and Bill Burnham. VentureBlog would get my vote as the "trendsetter" (even though other VCs had started blogging before February 2003) but there has not been too much activity on the blog lately. Ed got my vote for being one of the most consistent on the VC topic, though I pointed out in my "ballot" that it was difficult to single out one VC blogger since it is the diversity and wealth of experience brought by the whole group that generates value for entrepreneurs.

I also wanted to mention Allen (Morgan)'s Blog (I only found out recently about it because Allen listed it in his email signature). Allen is a Mayfield General Parter, and has invested quite a lot in the "social media" space (Tribe.net, Pluck, JotSpot,...). Not surprisingly, he mentions his interests in online tools and where he sees opportunities in enterprise software (basically, building upon these online tools). He also shared with us the first two of his "Ten Commandments for Entrepreneurs": How best to approach a VC firm, and Be on time.

Both advice are very valid, and I can only add to the "be on time/early" one based on my experience of pitching VC firms with my clients: be prepared for any logistical or timing issue. A few tips/warnings:

• You will have less time than originally agreed, because of a late start, hard stop or last minute change of plans. You therefore need to modulate your pitch and your presentation accordingly, to make sure that the most critical points are addressed first... and don't wait for the last 5 minutes of the meeting (where the VC is starting to think about the next meeting) to lay those out.
• Even in the most prestigious firms, projectors, Internet access, etc. can be suboptimal. For example, having a laptop with a serious screen that can be used to display the presentation as a last resort can be a good thing. By the way, I seem to have witnessed more issues with Macs than PCs when using external projectors.
• Being ready means that you should enter the VC firm with your laptop ready to fire up your presentation (in hibernate mode, for example) to avoid a "boot-logging-run powerpoint-load the presentation-now I can start" sequence.
• Whilst you will have painfully structured your presentation in the most logical order, you will always face out-of-sequence questions. Some can be "bagged" and dealt with in a few slides, but more often than not, you will have to break your sequence of the presentation, and address topical questions as they come. You don't need to rush to the corresponding slide in order to answer a question, it is OK to given a summary response and indicate that you will build upon it when you deal with that topic. They key, though, is to make sure that all critical points have been mentioned.

And as I was checking Allen's trackbacks, I discovered "Ruminations on Russian Tech and Venture Capital Investing", written by a Alistair Tobie from Mint Capital, a russian VC firm that seems involved in the forthcoming DFJ Nexus fund. Quite interesting.

Since there is not much available (in English) about DFJ Nexus, here is an Ambar news snippet:

DFJ EXPLORES RAISING A FUND FOR RUSSIAN INVESTMENTS
Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an early-stage technology venture capital firm, said that it is exploring the opportunity to set up a fund to invest in Russian companies and U.S. companies leveraging Russian R&D. The fund, tentatively called DFJ Nexus Fund I, would go after early-stage IT companies, particularly those with global customers, said Alexei Andreev, an associate at DFJ who will be involved with the fund. The fund would invest both in Russia and in the other former Soviet republics, according to Andreev. It would also invest in U.S. companies run by Russian ex-pats who turn to associates back home for R&D services. The fund would make investments primarily in what he termed computationally intensive software and nanotechnology.

Comments

[David Hornik]

Gosh. Everyone's a critic. Ok, Jeff, I'll write something for VentureBlog if it will make you happy. By the way, to the best of my knowledge the only VC blogging before VentureBlog was Martin Tobias (http://www.martinandalex.com/blog/).

[Jeff Clavier]

You guys have been busy, and have done your deed by leading many of us to blogging anyway. So my reference to VBlog was by no means a critic. And yes, Martin was blogging beforehand but it was not VC material per se (and that is not a critic either :-).