Raising Money, Taking Names!
Hey everyone,
So tonight was another great night of NYC Entrepreneur Week and we had a great panel moderated by the very bright Maureen Farrell at Forbes and featuring Gil Beyda at Genacast, Chris Fralic at First Round, Amish Jani at First Mark, Mark Davis at DFJ & Matt Turck at Bloomberg Ventures . It was probably the best venture panel i’ve ever been to as everyone on it was open, refreshing and sharing tips, tricks and real information about pitching for money and your chances of success. Also our panel was primarily entrepreneurs who turned into VC’s (went over to the dark side!) and shared perspective from both sides. Very rarely do you get more than canned answers from investors, usually its polished company line, this was real information.
I also happen to be friends with a bunch of the guys on the panel and figured I would do something different so i did something that i think was a first. I got up and introduced myself as a co-founder of Nycent and related to the audience my real world experience with the panel.
First, I said how I met everyone. Chris I had met through a friend of the founder of a portfolio company, Gil i met through a bunch of different ways at once, Matt I actually met on www.asmallworld.net, Mark I met by reaching out to him through his blog and Amish I met because i pitched him (at an event I both marketing and was unprepared for!).
Out of 5 panelists, 2 of them i had met through non personal sources (social network and blog) so there is hope out there for the unconnected!
I then went even further and shared that 2 out of the 5 panelists passed on funding my startup (actually 4/5 passed on it but I forgot i pitched 2 of them). Yes, that’s right 4/5 of the panelists passed on my venture and i still am on great terms with them. Mark actually was the inspiration for starting the company (and his firm passed!).
In fact that only 1 of them i didn’t pitch was Matt (Matt took the position at Bloomberg as I was getting underway - we had lost touch and if we had reconnected a few weeks prior to that, i probably would have offered to make him a partner in the venture - as we had tried to do a startup together before but had to drop it due to a lack of time)
In my defense, I never seriously tried pitching it hard because the product wasn’t ready for prime time and I don’t want to take on money until i know it works but still!
Also, Gil had interviewed a potential hire for me as a favor last week and in the middle of the panel, he actually said “i’m going to back him now at a higher valuation”, which was pretty cool, I don’t think i’ve ever heard anyone offer to back someone publicly before. Now, I’m not sure if he was serious or if I would even want to raise money at this point but it was interesting.
The point of all this is that you need to keep on networking and build real relationships that transcend a no - if you want to be successful in the long run.





























