Speed Venture Summit

Yesterday I participated in a speed venture summit, it's like speed dating but it's companies and VCs. You fill out a form online to get accepted. The organizers hook up companies (about 75 are accepted) and investors (about 30 VCs and angels groups) by investment philosophy and company stage.

When you get there you get a dance card, each company has 6 or so meetings. All meetings are 13 minutes long and take place in a big room with one investor per table. There are no slide decks, there's no internet, you just pitch and demo best you can. At the end of the event the 5 top ranked companies by the investors nominated as finalists. The 5 finalists do a live one minute pitch in front of the entire audience. The audience then chooses the top two companies.

I thought our pitches went well. One of the firms was clearly a much later stage investor. Two of them went very well. Two others it was hard to tell. But I guess it went better than I thought, we were chosen as one of the top 5 to do a 1 minute live pitch.

A 1 minute pitch is tough. You need to define a market, a problem and a solution, and hopefully in the case of mobile leave enough time for a 20 second demo.

Foneshow came in second. The company that won had this really cool facial recognition software for the iPhone (I would have voted for them too).

But even second place has its rewards. I won schwag. A Peek email device and a Flip video camera.

A Tip on Closing a VC Round

Never try to close a VC round during the summer.

The problem is magnified if you're using a syndicate of several firms. The timing issues are a nightmare. Your VC will go on vacation (times however many VC firms are in the deal). Your lawyer will go on vacation. The VC's lawyers will go on vacation. Things that should take days, take weeks instead.

I'll be making a number of posts over the next few weeks detailing how we put together a VC investment.