Posts Tagged ‘entrepreneur’
VC Profile – Moore Venture Partners
Thursday, August 4th, 2011Terry Moore has been building and funding companies for two decades.
As the Managing Partner of Moore Venture Partners, LP, Terry sees up to 500 deals per year. From this list, he may seriously review a dozen of them and make an investment in about four of them.
Moore Venture Partners has established a unique niche in venture investing. Moore doesn’t seed or lead transactions, but the firm does source and qualify deals that fit the interests of the top VCs in Silicon Valley and beyond. Then, they participate in deals with top VC firms. Through this approach, Moore Venture Partners enables its limited partners to participate in investment opportunities to which they might not otherwise have access.
The Fund’s focus is technology and life sciences, particularly in southern California - companies with strong intellectual property (e.g. patents) in the early growth stages, and sometimes even in the expansion stage.
Terry has a solid track record of investing with returns coming from both acquisition opportunities and IPOs. His own operational experience helps him assess deals and their management teams. His extensive relationships with top VC and corporate investors enable his portfolio companies to have the best chance to grow and succeed. His leadership as Chairman of The VC Roundtable further indicates his commitment to bringing best practices and a collaborative spirit to venture investing.
ActSeed is glad to have firms like Moore Venture Partners involved in its Investor Group.
ActSeed provides Terry with visibility into a community of innovative startups – each having a series of ActSeed Scores that provide an indication of the company’s “investment-readiness”. The scores calculated for each startup in ActSeed’s Entrepreneur Group enables Terry to immediately get a sense of whether the startup has established a solid foundation on which to grow and where gaps in the business might exist. Gaps won’t necessarily kill an investment opportunity, but not knowing what issues need attention may become quickly fatal for both entrepreneur and investor. ActSeed’s contribution to the VC process is to bring any issues to the front of the conversation.
Moore Venture Partners is on track to provide great value to both its portfolio of startups and its limited partner investors. Terry Moore leads this effort by leveraging his experience and administering a thorough due diligence. Each year a few startups may become part of the Moore Venture Partners’ investment portfolio and benefit further from Terry’s guidance and extensive network. The hundreds of deals that don’t quite make the cut will need to look elsewhere for their capital needs. ActSeed is glad to help Moore in his quest to find appropriate deals for his fund and provide a resource for the deals he sees that may not be ”investor-ready” and need to find funding elsewhere.
To learn more about Moore Venture Partners, please visit the Moore Venture Partners web site.
To learn more about how ActSeed can help your startup become investor-ready and find VC or individual investors who may be interested in your venture, please
- Download ActSeed’s 5-page white paper,
- Register on ActSeed.com and
- Join ActSeed’s Entrepreneur Group.
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Your Ideal Source of Cash…
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011…is from customers!
A great way to grow your business: find new customers using daily deals from GroupPrice. ActSeed likes Group Price because they enable you to increase your sales with no upfront marketing expenses while cutting your costs with daily deals from other small businesses.
Problem
One of the growth problems for startups is getting more cash coming in than is going out. Cash is the fuel that powers a business. Not receivables or IOUs, but cash in the bank. You must positively impact your cash two ways:
- Increase revenues by attracting new paying customers
- Reduce expenses by finding great deals for the business services you need
Solution
ActSeed has partnered with GroupPrice to help you tap this innovative marketplace to boost your business in two important ways:
- Spark an increase in sales by tapping new customers without any upfront marketing or advertising expense.
- Find daily deals on products and services aimed at your start up or small businesses with discounts up to 80%.
How to Maximize the Benefits from the ActSeed-GroupPrice Partnership
Two steps. Both are free.
1. Register with GroupPrice so you can buy and sell on the GroupPrice marketplace.
2. Register with ActSeed where you can access exclusive promotions and discounts from our leading partners like GroupPrice.
Like Fox Business TV, we think Group Price is like Groupon® – but dedicated to entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses.
Summary
ActSeed and GroupPrice are aligned in a commitment to helping you find sources of capital and streams of revenue. Cash is king. Heck, cash is also queen, prince and the whole royal court.
Forrester Research has identified that “daily deals for business is a persistent and growing trend.” Startups and small businesses – the backbone of the US economy – have been badly weakened by the recession, but sites like Group Price are helping them recover and grow.
Raise your revenue. Cut your costs. Do both using GroupPrice.
…Now that’s an obvious partnership that ActSeed can champion.
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See You Tonight At StartupCircle!
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011If you are in San Diego this evening, please stop by the monthly StartupCircle event.
This month, Parand Darugar will be speaking. Parand is the founder and CEO of Xpenser a mobile expense management solution: manage time, expenses, and receipts via email, SMS, voice (call and say your expense), Twitter, iPhone, IM (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Google Talk), or the web.
Prior to Xpenser he spent 4 years at Yahoo! as one of the core architects of the Panama project, as manager of the platform groups (Yahoo! wide centers of expertise providing Java, Database, and other platform technologies), and as the scaling / grid architect for the Apex/Apt project.
Before Yahoo!, he was co-founder and Chief Architect of Blue Titan Software, a venture backed Web Services infrastructure company. Blue Titan was sold to SOA Software in 2005.
Prior to Blue Titan, Parand was co-founder and Chief Architect of VelociGen Inc, a venture backed Web application acceleration and scaling software company.
Getting Legal Guidance Should Always Be This Easy and Affordable
Friday, July 15th, 2011
Startups and small businesses are often incredibly hesitant to call a lawyer for advice. Why? Because they want to avoid legal issues? No. Because they want to avoid the invoice afterwards.
Navigating legal issues is a challenge — a time-consuming and costly component of launching a business. Small businesses need legal guidance from many angles: corporate law, securities law, employment law, patents, trademarks, privacy, finance, litigation, tax… and the list goes on.
Interpreting and applying the law often deals with “shades of gray” more than “black and white”. In other words, a handful of very smart attorneys may offer very different perspectives and legal advice on a given issue.
So, wouldn’t it be incredible if an entrepreneur or small business owner could throw out a legal question to 10 attorneys who have a relevant background and receive responses from each – all for just a few bucks?
The founders of LawPivot thought so, and ActSeed agrees.
LawPivot is one of those “no-brainer” services for a startup or small business budget. Being able to tap legal knowledge like this is invaluable. ActSeed is more than a strategic ally of LawPivot; it’s also a happy client. Consider this a very warm referral for all ActSeed members.
If you’d like to try LawPivot, they will give you a free trial.
If you become a member of the ActSeed community (register for ActSeed here to receive the LawPivot bonus code; it’s free!), ActSeed will give a Promotional Code to extend your free LawPivot service through the end of 2011.
Not all of a company’s legal needs can be boiled down to a crowd-sourced response. Attorneys and legal work will still need to be in the budget, but having access to a breadth of legal minds for a small monthly fee is invaluable. To receive this service for free during 2011 is, literally, priceless.
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Finding Angel Halos within Higher Education
Thursday, July 14th, 2011How University-Affiliated Angel Groups are Helping Fuel Startups While Supporting Higher Education.
Angel investors typically congregate into formal angel groups based upon geographic proximity and interests in certain industry sectors and/or specific growth stages. While these characteristics generally reflect the commonality within the Baylor Angel Network (BAN), what makes this angel group unique is how they have integrated Baylor University into their operation.
Operating an angel group within a university setting drives benefits to a broader group of beneficiaries, from business students to the business schools they attend.
In addition to the standard angel-entrepreneur activity, Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business receives an angel-designated percentage of the profits from each successful investment in the form of a gift to the University – on average, 25% of the profits generated by the donor from a successful exit. Also, a few students at Baylor are selected to serve as research analysts who contribute to the evaluation of prospective deals. Baylor Angels also mentor the student analysts and share their wisdom with students taking entrepreneurship classes. BAN doesn’t require its angel members to be alumni of Baylor, but they do expect each BAN angel to contribute some of their returns to the University.
ActSeed is grateful to have the Baylor Angel Network involved in the ActSeed Investor Group.
The disciplined, methodical approach that BAN applies to their investment decisions meshes well with ActSeed’s own methodical process for helping investors quickly understand “what’s under the hood”. While BAN does very well in analyzing their deal flow internally, ActSeed Company (Entrepreneur) Scores provide BAN angels with another indication of how well a startup will perform in the due diligence phase. In other words, ActSeed can help entrepreneurs quickly “bubble up” to the surface with angels and reduce the time it takes to go from first contact to funding decision.
Kevin Castello, Executive Director of the Baylor Angel Network, shares his thoughts:
“Excellence is revealed in execution. A lot of emphasis is placed on the vision, the business plan, the team, and other components but without execution they are just words on a page. There are so many challenges for a new entrepreneurial venture and it is critical to have an honest evaluation of your business. I love that ActSeed is committed to help entrepreneurs be prepared for their venture and to provide them tools for that process. BAN looks forward to a continued partnership with the ActSeed community.”
Before approaching the Baylor Angel Network or any angel group, an entrepreneur must first explore whether investors would even be interested in their venture. ActSeed’s Investor profile helps clarify this. For example, an entrepreneur can review the Baylor Angel Network’s ActSeed profile to learn:
- What types of deals generally interest the 40+ angel investors who are members of BAN,
- Where BAN angels are looking to invest (across five southwestern states), and
- How much they intend to invest (amounts usually between $100,000 and $300,000, including participation in larger deals up to $2 million when there’s a lead investor already established).
For entrepreneurs who may be thinking about approaching the Baylor Angel Network, consider approaching them through ActSeed’s Entrepreneur Group where you can do more than pitch them an idea – you can demonstrate your “investor-readiness” through your ActSeed Scores and possibly get moved to the front of the line for consideration.
To learn more about the Baylor Angel Network and how they are integrating angel investing within the University, you can download their introductory document here.
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Impact Your Business
Saturday, June 11th, 2011Many entrepreneurs are “allergic to the numbers side of the business”. Part of the high failure rate of small businesses is due to avoiding and ignoring basic financial principals.
Ken Kaufman’s book explains the essentials of small business finance and how to easily apply them through the use of allegory. In other words, he uses “good ol’ fashioned story-telling” to make even the most finance-phobic business owner learn and appreciate the need for quantitative, financial management.
This is not just a story about Steve, a man struggling as a small business owner, a husband and a dad. It is a guide penned in a way we can all identify with. It goes beyond merely being clever about teaching financials.
For example, in Chapter 23, the protagonist (Steve) starts to see, from his own experiences, how anxiety and clarity are negatively correlated. This is a non-financial lesson we all must learn and respect. This book is full of well-articulated insights that we all face as business owners.
The first time you read it, Kaufman’s book is an enjoyable story that “hits home”. Then, it becomes a very useful reference guide for the next hundred times you’ll take it off your bookshelf.
You can get your copy of “Impact Your Business” here.
Kick the Tires: A Continuing Series for a New Generation of Small Business Investors
Monday, May 23rd, 2011ActSeed’s mission of reducing small business failure rates depend upon both well-prepared entrepreneurs and well-informed investors. This new series of articles, called “Kick the Tires”, will help both investors and entrepreneurs align for the best chances to achieve reciprocal success.
["Kicking the Tires" - an idiom - giving something an initial inspection before making a decision to pursue a transaction - origin: early car buyers would kick a vehicle's tires to see if they properly held air]
So far, we have been more visible on the entrepreneur-preparation side of the equation. Recently, we have started to make significant inroads on the other side of the same equation - sharing “best practices” with a new generation of small business investors and attracting seasoned investors with our methodologies that will help them accelerate the review process (“due diligence”) for making investment decisions.
“Kick the Tires” is a new series of articles that highlight the many issues that a small business investor or “startup angel” should address before making an investment decision. We’ll include red flags to watch for. We’ll review “tangibles” and “intangibles” alike. We’ll explore small business investing from almost every angle, including legal, financial, organizational, strategic and cultural.
To date, our primary efforts toward building new reservoirs of investor capital have been through our workshops and webinars (“How to Evaluate Prospective Deals Like a Professional Angel Investor“). These workshops are well-attended, but it feels like we try to cram two months of information into a two hour presentation. Seriously, we do share a lot of information in a short period of time. From there, we develop a relationship and rapport with the attendees to assure they have tools to find and evaluate small business investment opportunities within the ActSeed entrepreneur community and beyond. Kick the Tires is meant to supplement, expand and reinforce the knowledge shared in our workshops.
Who will benefit from reading the articles in this series?
Small business investors - both novice and seasoned. Whether you want to invest $5,000 or $5 million, you still should apply a defined due diligence methodology and process to assure your interests are aligned with your investment choice.
Entrepreneurs. These articles don’t contain fabricated hurdles or secret handshakes, but they do outline the issues that together create a solid business foundation that will give the business the greatest resistance to failure, which is another way to say the greatest chances for success. Investors don’t want to invest in a company destined for failure any more than the entrepreneur wants to build a business exposed to avoidable failure. In other words, what’s good for the investor is also good for the entrepreneur, making this series equally relevant to those building businesses.
Beyond the articles in this series, what can be done to help connect “well-prepared entrepreneurs” with “well-informed investors”?
Join ActSeed. Apply the knowledge that is shared in the articles by joining the ActSeed Entrepreneur Group or the ActSeed Investor Group. The principles and issues we highlight in “Kick the Tires” are the same that we use to connect compatible ‘treps and investors within ActSeed.com using our scored profiles and filtered search tools.
Finally, please send us suggestions or questions about small business investing that you’d like us to cover. We’ll do our best to address these issues here as well. Please send your questions about small business investing to: groupadmin.investor@actseed.com.
Together, let’s get to work and build some wealth!
Positive Impact 365: Big Brands Helping Small Business
Thursday, May 19th, 2011ActSeed has developed a program to help large enterprises and governmental agencies foster entrepreneurship and build early relationships with today’s emerging small businesses and tomorrow’s most promising startups.
There is a natural symbiosis between large enterprises and an “Innovation Economy” full of startups and emerging businesses.
Tomorrow’s market leaders are hard at work today, building companies that will grow our economy by generating taxable profits, creating jobs and contributing to free enterprise. Today’s “big brands” want to engage those young companies that are taking steps to build a solid business foundation for a long life. The same big brands want to avoid companies that show signs of being “here today but gone tomorrow”.
While some of today’s small businesses will grow up to be big brands and dominant market leaders, most successful small businesses will become customers and partners of large enterprises. In addition to selling products and services to small biz, big corporations constantly look for innovation within small companies to find new products, processes and technologies to invest in, license or even acquire.
With over 50% of all new businesses not even lasting five years, it is important for large enterprises to invest time and money with the companies that are avoiding the behaviors that often lead to failure, including a lack of planning, inadequate preparation and the failure to establish sound business fundamentals from the very beginning.
State and local economic development agencies are also very interested in attracting and nurturing small businesses that have potential to grow, create jobs and contribute to the local economy.
Governmental agencies are not usually interested or able to compete in the “home run ball” game that venture capital firms play with its portfolio of young companies, where one big ”hit” (company) might generate enough returns to account for the remainder of the investment portfolio to be written off or sold at breakeven at best. Economic development agencies don’t manage investment portfolios that must generate returns in a finite amount of time; rather, they want to nurture companies that will contribute to the local economy over generations, even if they don’t “get big fast”.
In summary, large enterprises and governmental agencies can use ActSeed’s “Positive Impact 365™” program to identify and nurture the most promising small businesses in specific industries and at specific growth stages.
If you want to learn more about how you can get your brand or agency involved in the Positive Impact 365 program, please send us an email to positiveimpact365@actseed.com.
Where to Go to Test and Improve Your Elevator Pitch
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011Inside Pitch for Entrepreneurs and Angels:
Crowd-Based Feedback for Startup Elevator Pitches
Our new LinkedIn group is a collaborative area for “perfecting the quick pitch”.
You typically get 45 seconds or 45 words – your “inside pitch” – to articulate your business model to customers, angels, VC and other investors. Join ActSeed’s LinkedIn group to test your message on fellow group members for constructive feedback, and help other entrepreneurs scrub their pitch, too.
How to participate:
Join ActSeed’s LinkedIn Group called “Inside Pitch” – it’s free!
Post your “inside pitch” as a new LinkedIn discussion in this group.
Invite others to provide constructive feedback.
Use the comment thread to refine the pitch and interact with those who are helping you.
Who should participate:
Entrepreneurs, small business owners, angels, investors, venture capitalists, founders of startups, students, executives, business coaches. Essentially, anybody who needs help or wants help in perfecting elevator pitches.
What happens when your pitch is ready?
Go find customers and/or investors and share your message!
Of course, ActSeed.com is a good venue to find “well-informed investors” who want to engage “well-prepared entrepreneurs”.
RULES:
1. Keep it constructive and civil. Rude or arrogant comments are not welcomed. We want to cultivate a forum where we help each other improve what we say or write when we pitch our business so when we do it “live” in front of a customer or investor , it resonates.
2. This is not a forum for you present your entire business plan or executive summary. This is where you try to say “more with less”. Here, we want to refine how we open the discussion so our targeted audience asks us to share more. This forum is for each of us to metaphorically “sharpen the hook that we’ll use to catch our fish”.
3. This is NOT a venue to solicit for funding. Please do not indiscriminately broadcast a need for funding. If an investor likes your pitch or your concept, they will likely contact you. Please keep the focus on perfecting the message. We will aggressively moderate against misuse of this group.
Inside Pitch is sponsored and managed by ActSeed, an online community for startups and small businesses – a community dedicated to providing the best resources to help entrepreneurs properly plan, establish a solid operational foundation, attract investment and become highly competitive in the marketplace.
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Accessing the World from Your Own Back Yard
Monday, May 9th, 2011It’s not uncommon that a startup in the USA has an almost immediate international presence, and it’s also not uncommon that entrepreneurs from other countries are trying to access US markets.
While we often talk about how the Internet shrinks borders and facilitates commerce, sometimes a “good ole fashioned” cross-border support group works well, too.
One good example of cross-border collaboration that is helping entrepreneurs and startup businesses in two countries is the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce (“SACC”), and ActSeed is proud to be a partner with the San Diego chapter. Founded in 1988, SACC-USA is the umbrella organization for 19 regional Swedish-American Chambers of Commerce across the United States. The SACC serves more than 2,300 members in Sweden and the US. 
The mission of the SACC is to facilitate and support trade, commerce, and investment between the US and Sweden – helping Swedish companies find the right partners in the USA and vice versa. This is achieved through effective industry specific programs and events, corporate programs, trade missions, business matchmaking and lots of ”good old fashioned” networking.
The SACC San Diego was founded in 1989 as one of the first local Swedish chambers in America. The Swedish American Chamber of Commerce in San Diego is a non-profit organization with the goal to promote, develop, and increase the Swedish–American contacts and interactions in the greater San Diego area.
More and more, the San Diego SACC is becoming involved in the local San Diego startup scene. Entrepreneurs from both countries are starting to collaborate on projects and help each other tap new markets and find investors. Through the international partnership between the SACC and ActSeed, we can help make sure entrepreneurs, investors and work-seekers in the US are aware of the opportunities emanating from and within Sweden while also helping entrepreneurs and investors in Sweden learn how to leverage ActSeed to participate in business creation and growth in the US.
You can learn more about the San Diego Swedish American Chamber of Commerce by clicking here.
Also, if you are involved with the San Diego SACC and are interested in joining ActSeed’s “Entrepreneur Group“, you can use discount code “SDSACC12″ to receive a 10% discount on either a monthly or annual membership.
If you are an investor from Sweden and want to find startups or small businesses in the US in which to invest, please join ActSeed’s “Investor Group” and start tracking deals; it takes about 15 minutes to get set up and costs nothing for the investor.
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