Jeff Maurone

Funding Your Business - From Plan to Reality

The second event in our fall series (theme focused on vision) of the MIT Venture Lab is coming up next week.  Below is the official marketing text and you can register here.

Thursday, October 4, 2007
6:00 to 8:00pm
Doors open @ 5:30pm

"Funding Your Business - From Plan to Reality"
(Part two of the Business Vision Series)
One Union Square Boardroom
600 University St., First Level
(Lower lobby, 6th Avenue level, behind the escalator)
Seattle, WA 98101

Capital is the fuel that enables a new company to get off the ground and an existing company to reach new heights.  One key to any successful business start-up and expansion is the ability to secure appropriate financing.  The process of raising capital can be complex, drawn-out, and often times frustrating.  However, armed with the right information and an effective capital-raising plan, entrepreneurs can navigate the process in a timely and successful fashion.

In the second event of the fall Venture Lab series on business vision, Frank Barbieri, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Transpera and Scott Darling, General Partner of Frazier Technology Ventures, will share their experiences on successful funding strategies and key aspects of the fundraising process.

This event will explore the various aspects of the capital raising process, including:

• Key funding issues from the financier's and entrepreneur’s perspectives
• Identifying the most appropriate funding sources and how to best approach and win them over
• Allocating the necessary time and company resources to the process
• Shepherding potential investors through due diligence
• Valuation issues and the effects of today's market conditions
• Deal structure and current investor requirements
• Creative and alternative ways to fund a business
• The after-effects of the fund-raising process and its impact on future business.

Frank Barbieri – Founder, Chairman and CEO, Transpera

Frank founded Transpera with the vision of helping normal people enjoy new kinds of mobile video experiences. Frank recently ran media products at InfoSpace and also ran the Windows Mobile Media Device and Services group at Microsoft. Frank also held a senior position at Onvia, a company he helped take public, and MSNBC where he drove the online video distribution business and interactive content division. He has most recently worked in the private equity industry doing mobile and entertainment strategy and portfolio company support. Frank started his career as a photojournalist documenting the plight of refugees globally.

Scott Darling – General Partner, Frazier Technology Ventures

Scott has more than 25 years of experience as a technology executive. Most recently, Scott spent 7 years with Intel Capital where he was Vice President and Managing Director.   During this tenure at Intel Capital he managed the teams responsible for the Digital Home and Enterprise investment sectors in support of the business units representing more than two thirds of Intel’s revenue.  During Scott’s years at Intel and prior to joining Intel Capital in 2000, he was the general manager for several business units including the Internet Media Services Division and the Personal Conferencing Division, as well as the marketing director for the OEM Computer Systems Division. Before Intel, Scott worked in product marketing at Apple Computer and at two early PC industry startups: VisiCorp and Osborne Computer Systems.

Scott received his MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business in 1988. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1981, where he studied economics and computer science.

From an Idea to a Business

Wow.  I wrote the below text and never published this to the live version of this blog.  This event is now over, but I still want to post this marketing text, just because I use this blog to keep track of these events.

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We spent a bunch of hours nagging CEO's in the days after their return from vacation to speak at our first Venture Lab event in the fall 2007 series.  If you're interested, we'll see you Thursday night downtown!

Below is the official marketing text and you can register here.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

From an Idea to a Business

Location : One Union Square Boardroom
600 University St., First Level
Seattle, WA 98101
Lower lobby, 6th Avenue level, behind the escalator)
Date & Time : September 6, 2007 - 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

It all starts with an idea. Many successful startups begin when a passionate entrepreneur conceives of a brilliant idea. Many unsuccessful startups fail when the entrepreneur does not succeed at converting that idea into a profitable business. Successfully turning that brilliant idea into a profitable business is the art of entrepreneurship.

In the first event of the fall Venture Lab series on business vision, Alexander Castro, CEO & co-founder of Pluggd, Andy Sack, a Serial Entrepreneur, and Adam Philipp of the Axios Law Group will deal with the process of turning an idea into a business. Please join them as they share their knowledge, experience and perspective surrounding this exciting topic.

Topics covered will include:

• How to analyze the market effectiveness of your idea
• How to build an organization around your idea
• How to protect your idea (specifically dealing with intellectual property protection and patent/trade secret options)

Alexander Castro - CEO and co-founder - Pluggd

Alexander has deep product and management experience from Microsoft, Amazon, and Trilogy. At Microsoft he was the Group Program Manager for the MSN Entertainment business unit, which included the MSN Music, Video, Movies, and TV websites. He also drove the company’s device synchronization strategy for Windows Vista and was a key member of the CRM team. At Trilogy, Alex led the successful deployment of a complex CRM solution for Toyota, and was responsible for the marketing and program management of Amazon’s web services and oversaw the launch of the Mechanical Turk online marketplace.

Alexander holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University, where he also completed coursework at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management. As an undergrad, he was named a AT&T Bell Laboratories Scholar, which provided a full scholarship to the college of his choice and an opportunity to work on digital media, voice over IP, and speech recognition at Bell Labs. As a graduate student, Alex was a recipient of a full tuition scholarship from the Microsoft Corp.

Andy Sack – Serial Entrepreneur

Andy is a high technology serial entrepreneur. Most recently, Andy has been entrepreneur in residence (EIR) for Mobius Venture Capital (formerly SOFTBANK) and a regular lecturer at University of Washington Business’ School. During his tenure as an EIR, Andy has been founder and board member to three companies: Bodyshop Digital, Kefta, and Quova. Prior to this, Andy founded and sold two successful Internet companies; abuzz technologies and firefly network. Andy was CEO at abuzz from 1996 to 1999 when he sold the company to the New York Times Digital unit. During Andy's tenure at the company, abuzz was named number one in the Internet software category by Red Herring Magazine and number one company to work for by Boston Magazine. Prior to abuzz, Andy was a co-founder of Firefly Network, which was later sold to Microsoft Corporation. Andy has advised a number of companies including m-value, Cambridge Incubator, lease forum, and Green Order. Andy was a founder and board member of Students for Responsible Business. He received a BA from Brown University and an MBA from MIT. Andy lives in Seattle, WA.

Adam L.K. Philipp – Axios Law Group

Mr. Philipp has been involved in the prosecution of patent applications in the computer science, electrical devices and related fields since 1998 and with Internet and technology related law since 1995. He also counsels clients on patent portfolio strategy, patentability and infringement matters. His varied practical experiences range from distributed object oriented programming to kernel-level memory management. His area of emphasis covers a wide variety of patent, trademark and trade secret issues, with particular focus on network and security related applications. Typical clients of Mr. Philipp’s are software and technology companies as well as related inventors.  Mr. Philipp speaks fluent Hebrew and basic Japanese. He and his family live in the Seattle area.

I am Charlotte Simmons

Last night I finished Tom Wolfe's tome, I am Charlotte Simmons.  My goodness, this was the single finest piece of literature I've read so far in 2007.

This tome weighed in at nearly seven-hundred pages but, in the end, I wish it had gone longer.  My experience at Villanova is now sufficiently in my past to warrant missing it and, reading this book, I felt like it was written for me.  Allow me to elaborate.

I am Charlotte Simmons is, at the highest level, an effort to chronicle the American undergraduate experience just after the turn of the twenty-first century.  Though the novel's ambitions are broad, I would say it's more successful in chronicling the private undergraduate experience, especially given the emphasis put on the lone middle-class student being surrounded by the enormous wealth of the day-school/boarding-school crowd.  The issues Wolfe tackles are sweeping: the pseudo-intellectuals that build naïve theories of the world, the casual sexual culture, the concentration of minorities on the basketball team, the meeting of low-class parents and bourgeoisie parents, professors unwilling to tolerate "student-athletes." It's all there.

In so many ways this was Villanova to me.  I remember stopping reading a number of times after something in the book perfectly captured a thought or concern that, five years ago, I thought I was the only one thinking.  These were among the eeriest points of the book.

But on a lower level, the book also wrestles with something Mickey Craig and Jon Fennell call, "Love in the Age of Neuroscience," in what I found to be the finest review I read.  I'm not going to dedicate the effort required to explain this entire piece of the novel, other than to say it concerns the notion of absolute morality becoming a thing of the past.  We are less and less bound by codified moral codes like, say, Christianity.  It is becoming more and more accepted that we conform to the morality of our container and when our container is an American university, imagine how the future might look.  The philosophical undercurrents don't stop with neuroscience, though.  There's also the underlying struggle for self and self-actualization, there's the desire to define oneself as a member of a group, and there's more.

If you've recently graduated from an American university, I am Charlotte Simmons is a worthwhile read.

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Photo is Coach Jay Wright and the Villanova Wildcats, licensed under Creative Commons from Flickr User BrianEwart [Link].

Single funniest piece of Brian Williams content

Ever since I sat in the control room for a live broadcast of Nightly News with Brian Williams, I've had enormously more respect for what it takes to put together thirty minutes of live news coverage every night. 

Before each broadcast, Brian and the producers put together a less-than-five-minute piece called the Early Nightly.  Today's piece is perhaps the funniest single piece of Brian Williams content I've seen, during which Brian gives a short tour of the Nightly News set.  Hilarious; check it out!

UPDATE: This is now gone.  Apparently we don't archive daily nightly videos.  My apologies if you didn't watch this on the 18th of September.

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Photo is licensed under a Creative Commons license from Flickr User Chung Chu [Link].

Stopping the motor of the world

From article in today's Times, regarding Ayn Rand:

She is said to have seduced her most serious reader, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 24 or 25 and she was at least 50. Each was married to someone else. In fact, Mr. Britting confirmed, they called their spouses to a meeting at which the pair announced their intention to make the mentor-protégé relationship a sexual one.

Wow.

Just this morning Ayn Rand popped into my head.  Sunday night into Monday morning in Seattle had an unmistakable feeling of fall in the air: gloomy, dark, a bit cold and absolutely overcast.  Every morning I walk three blocks from my apartment to the closest 545 bus stop.  During the three months I spent reading Atlas Shrugged, the book had such an impact on me that I began ascribing significance to the items on this walk. 

The cables that run above Third Ave reminded me of the buses that are "expertly steered" through Ayn Rand's unforgiving and metallic New York City.  This red clock always made me think of this passage:

He turned a corner.  In the narrow space between the dark silhouettes of two buildings, as in the crack of a door, he saw the page of a gigantic calendar suspended in the sky...It was the calendar that the mayor of New York had erected last year on the top of a building, so that citizens might tell the day of the month as they told the hours of the day, by glancing up at a public tower.

And then, this morning, I found this article from this weekend's paper.  Even a year and a half later, the profound effect this book had on me remains top of mind.  Just as profound, I'm sure, as the impacts described in that article.

It has been my conclusion that objectivism is not a philosophy.  It's not a tool for understanding the motion of bodies in the universe.  It is Ayn Rand's ideology of how the universe should operate put forth in an enormously beautiful novel.  The problem with ideologies is that the universe has an enormous number of moving pieces.  Accurately capturing the effects of each of those moving pieces in an ideology is nearly impossible.  What happens when an incomplete ideology is projected 0nto the world?  Communism.  Millions of people die in the journey to an end that never really worked in the first place.

So I don't agree with the arguments put forth by objectivism.  That doesn't, however, detract from my immense love of the characters and world put forth by the novel.  Perhaps my only disapproval of the article is in the poor closing sentences: "New clients usually ask: ‘Hey, where is John Galt? How come I’m not important enough to rate a visit from John Galt?’ ”  Come on.  The proper question is not 'where' but 'who' and I think it's well within the realm of acceptable journalism to push the quote in that direction.  Who is John Galt? 

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Photo is text of The Fountainhead, under a Creative Commons license from Flickr User christmascarol [Link].

Who stole my country?

From today's New York Times:

The Pacific island state of Tuvalu begged the rest of the world to do more to combat global warming before it sank beneath the ocean. The group of atolls and reefs, home to some 10,000 people, is barely six feet above sea level on average, and one study predicted that, at the current rate, the ocean will swallow the country in 30 to 50 years. “We keep thinking that the time will never come,” Deputy Prime Minister Tavau Teii said. “The alternative is to turn ourselves into fish and live under water.”

Note that I have not publicly expressed my position on global warming.  This quote is here not as a call to action to fight global warming so much as for the inherent peculiarity of such text appearing in the Times.

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Photo is from the music room of John Moran's historic mansion on Orcas Island, Washington.  Link.

From red to blue in seven years

I still love that picture.  I took it back in 2006 when Mark Warner was still testing the waters for a 2008 presidential bid.  Later in 2006 he did announce that he wouldn't run and, in all, it was likely a good pick. I don't think he could've competed with the Clinton/Obama momentum.

Rewind to the Virginia of 2001.

You had Jim Gillmore, a Republican, in the governor spot and George Allen and John Warner in the senate spots, both also Republicans.  Red, red and red. 

And then everything changed.  Mark Warner won the governorship.  Then after his term was up (the Virginia constitution prevents seeking a second term), he succeeded in getting his choice, Tim Kaine, into office.  Then Jim Webb ousted George Allen to pick up a senate seat in 2006.

And now, John Warner announces that he won't seek reelection in 2008 and two weeks later Mark Warner announces that he'll formally announce in December.  Excellent.

The respect for Warner in Virginia is so high that this election is almost a shoo-in.  If history plays out this means that the Virginia that was fiery red in 2001 will have gone completely blue by 2008.  This former capital of the Confederacy went from red to blue in seven years. Virginia is a perfect example of the enormous shift of power continuing to propagate through the country.

The great Mark Warner v. John Warner story I love is what Warner said were his bumper stickers when they ran opposed in 1996: "Mark, not John."  For now, though, let's keep it simple: Mark Warner for Senate!

Breathtaking tower of glass...lines

When The New York Times occupied 229 West 43rd Street, you entered into a lobby that was about the size of your freshman college dorm: probably ten feet by ten feet.  The walls were dirty, the guards were angry, the lighting was dim fluorescent. Everything was a mess.  The elevators were badly lit and yellowing.  Old newspapers littered every corner of the newsroom.  The dining rooms made your high school cafeteria look like a piece of haute couture.

But if 43^rd Street had something, it was character. Walking the newsroom, every artifact seemed to be the byproduct of a reporter trying to get a story in before a deadline. The desk where Jayson Blair fabricated stories looms large over a newsroom on edge about integrity. Sitting in the conference room where management selects the next day’s front page, you know that the walls around you once listened to editors decide to publish the Pentagon papers.

Fast forward to 2007.

The 43^rd Street building is boarded up. A recent stroll by turned up commercial workers power washing away every visual blemish as the building prepares to become luxury condominiums. The people that make the New York Times happen have moved to the new New York Times Tower at 620 Eighth Avenue, which I visited during a recent trip to New York. While the new tower is represents a leap forward for what can be achieved in the era of green construction, it no doubt lacks the character of the old.

The lobby of the tower is, at once, sterile and majestic. Those security guards are still present, but their desks are now massive structures docked in front of expansive orange walls with The New York Times emblazoned in polish metal. An Annie Liebovitz photo installation named, “Building the Times,” adorns the opposing wall.

The tower is smart, very smart. Every piece of outdoor wall on every floor is glass. While that glass affords some of the best office views in New York, it also doubles as a lighting source. Too much direct sunlight? The building automatically lowers retractable shades to compensate, without as much as a squint from workers. Computers individually turn on, turn off or dim fluorescent lights as natural light sources outside the building come and go. White noise generators perched high above desks eliminate most of those shouts across rows of cubicles. Private office lights turn on as you enter and off as you leave.

All of that technology extends to the whole building: the newsroom, research & development, senior management. This, I think, is where the building comes up short. Rows of ergonomically sound cubicles, transparent offices, window shades and light fixtures create expansive lines. Those lines become very apparent any time you glance across an entire floor. Though the faces on each floor are different, the first things you see are those repeating lines. Without looking at nameplates, there is nothing to distinguish the heralded newsroom from a set of random cubes. All of that character and history that filled every hallway of the old building is lost for the sake of ergonomics, efficiency and sustainability.

In the end, I am on the fence regarding this building. I see technology as an artistic expression and so I do not necessarily think that asceticism is inherently less beautiful than pomp. But for an institution I respect as much as the White House, it seems out of place to lose so much history in pursuit of efficiency.

Photo credits (all licensed under Creative Commons):

• Flickr User: cheesebikini
• Flickr User: coba
• Flickr User: emily geoff
• Flickr User: thoth92
• Flickr User: An Pu Ruo

Alpaca on San Juan Island

From some time Maggie and I spent on Krystal Acres Alpaca Farm.

The rare Alpaca is a charming and valuable member of the Camelid family.  Alpacas are prized for their luxurious and costly fiber which is harvested by shearing once a year.  An Alpaca sweater or blanket is a cherished possession, frequently handed down from one generation to the next.  The Alpaca gestation period is eleven months.  The baby is called a Cria.  Alpacas are a herd animal and are native to the Andes Mountains of South America.  Alpacas are very gentle, clean animals and make wonderful pets.

Text taken from sign on San Juan Island, Washington State.  I need to post more about the fun of my weekend, but for now this picture can speak for the whole of it.

Picture link.