Getting Funded

We have enjoyed all of the holiday cards that have come our way this season. Below is an example of one of our favorites. Anyone who has started a company can relate to the company being more of a member of the family than anything else. Happy Holidays!

What is your favorite holiday card you’ve received this year?

____

Subject: Holiday Greetings (Tis the Season for Shameless Self Promotion)

Happy Holidays!

It’s the holiday season. Time for shameless self-promotion! We all do it…holiday cards about the new promotion at work, the kids excelling at school and sports, the vacations.

As an entrepreneur, you don’t get promotions and you don’t take vacations, so you have to talk about your business as if it’s your child.

This year, we conceived, delivered and got the kid into elementary school in under 10 months! Now we are pushing it to excel and expect it to be scoring the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl in the next 5 years. Yes, we are very overbearing parents.

Let me explain (*Yes, the email looks long, but it is worth the read)

AI Exchange, Inc. officially launched in February 2011. We have two subsidiaries: AI Advisors, LLC and AI Exchange Technologies, LLC. AI Advisors is a Registered Investment Advisor and AI Exchange Technologies provides the technology for our platform. We closed a venture funding round in September led by General Catalyst and Common Angels.

Hands out Cigars

So, what makes our kid so special? Our child makes the World of Investments a better place. The World of Investments has been bullied by the elite for too long. If you want access to better risk adjusted returns, then you better hand over millions in lunch money, suffer a wedgie or two, and possibly a swirly. Don’t even try to sit with the elite at the lunch table.

But, along comes our kid who makes everyone around them want to cooperate better. In our World, the kids all sit together, they are open and honest with each other, and they have good manners and sportsmanship. This never would have happened without our little AI Exchange.

Are you sure your kid isn’t named Tim Tebow?

Trust me, someday Tim Tebow might even be singing the praises of AI Exchange. AI Exchange facilitates the relationship between long/short equity managers (the cool kids) and investors (us). Specifically, AI Advisors trades long/short equity strategies directly in the client account using the software developed by AI Exchange Technologies. For example, if you have an account at Schwab or Fidelity, you will see the hedged equity strategy tactically being traded right in your account. This is like AI Exchange driving the cool kid to your house to teach you and your kids how to be cool….for free.

Free!

This is a business model that provides numerous benefits to investors and their advisors. The investor maintains custody or their assets, has daily liquidity, full transparency, and can invest at much lower minimums. We don’t even charge the investor for this service. Pretty cool, right?

Wow…that sounds like something even Barney Frank could support!

Historically, an investment advisor would advise clients that hedge funds, by nature, are risky. “Stay away. Don’t go near that kid. I don’t care how cool he looks.” Much of this was apparent in 2008. Investors could not access their capital, they had no idea what was being traded (Madoff), and many funds lost tremendous amounts of value due to excess leverage.

Thanks for the advice. ..I’ll just eat much lunch over here in peace and quiet.

However, long/short equity strategies often improve portfolio risk adjusted returns. There is a good-side to the cool kid, and we need to get to know it. Large institutions have been sitting with the cool kids and using long/short equity strategies for their benefit for years. If it’s working for Harvard and Yale, then maybe it should work for everyone.

Occupy Harvard Yard!

Wait, we’re not quite the 99% yet. Typically, an investor would need to invest $1 million or more in a hedge fund, but our minimums for a separately managed account are $100,000. There is still a “Qualified” investor requirement for strategies that charge a performance fee, but we do have one strategy that does not charge a performance fee and is eligible for retirement accounts. I guess our school is a bit more like an expensive boarding school than a public school, but at least the kids are all playing nicely.

Wait…there’s more!

Well, not really. That’s pretty much it. We have a team of 6 great employees that you can read about on our website www.ai-advisors.com. Since AI Exchange sits behind the scenes, we don’t really have any pictures to share, but we do have an animated video that you might find entertaining. Additionally, I can send you the manager profiles if you are interested in learning more about the strategies we offer.

As you know, it takes a village to raise a business. There has never been an entrepreneur who created success and value without the support of their friends. Thanks to everyone for your support, your feedback and your encouragement.

And, if you know anyone who might be interested in learning how to be cool…please send them my way. My kid needs new friends.

Happy Holidays!

Charlie

Co-founder and CIO, AI Exchange

AI Exchange is Winner of the New England 2011 HBS Alumni New Venture Contest

You are at a holiday party and go to get yourself a drink from the bar, and there, right next to you waiting for a glass of wine is that one magical person that you have been dying to get an intro to for months. You realize that you only have until his drink is poured to hook him in, what do you do? Tackle bartender and spill all the wine, so you can have more than 30 seconds to talk? I hope not.

This is why it’s important to always be ready with that quick, short, to the point pitch of who you and your company are (and why you are awesome).

As passionate as entrepreneurs can get about their ideas and their business it is often surprising how hard the one-minute pitch is. I say this both as someone who has given plenty and heard plenty. I wear multiple hats as someone who helps entrepreneurs at The Capital Network, and someone who is marketing a new business at Textaurant. So I know from both sides of the coin why the one minute pitch is both difficult yet crucial.

It is always frustrating to have a very excited entrepreneur come and share their idea with me and after the first minute of our discussion I’m still completely confused as to what the product is or even how they will make money.

In the beginning when I started working with Textaurant I had a very hard time condensing what we did into a few sentences that both made it perfectly clear who we are and what we do, but also that didn’t make people get that glazed look of boredom in their eye. The passion and excitement that I felt about our company and product made it easy for me to go on and on for quite a while about why we are changing the way people wait and how everyone should use our technology, but that passion also made it hard to sum up in a few short sentences.

Our founder Josh would tell me over and over what he said and I would try to remember it perfectly I would always mess it up or stumble. The way that I finally got it down was when Josh handed me an iPad to demo at a networking event and pushed me into the crowd. “Don’t come back until you’ve spoken to everyone”

Two hours and who knows how many unsuspecting people later I finally had it! Every person I talked to would ask a different question after I explained who we were and I used that to fine tune my next pitch adjusting my pitch based on what I was realizing were the key aspects other people were picking up on, which might be slightly different than what I had originally thought.

Depending on who you are talking to, what your company is and how complicated it is, there will be different things to focus on, but if you are just sitting down to plan your first attempt at a one minute pitch there are three main points that can guide you through:

1. Who are you?

Introduce yourself. Don’t give a whole long life story, nobody needs to know that you were born in the rain on a Tuesday, but they do want to know your name at the very least.

2. What do you and your company do?

Yes, I know it’s obvious, but if you don’t get this out after the first few words you will lose everyone. You should be able to some up the big picture of what you and your company do in one clear sentence. The following sentences just expand on the overall picture of what you do.

3. Why are you different?

Why is your idea so important and different than any other option out there. This shouldn’t be a total break down of the competitor matrix you have on your desk, but should at least give the listener and idea of that “wow” factor behind your business that makes it so great.

Once you have the basic script figure out, throw it away. The last thing you want to do is memorize it word for word and sound canned. You will never say the same thing twice, and that is ok.

The most important thing to do is practice. Practice on someone who knows very little about what you do, especially if you have a highly technical or complicated product. Give your pitch, pay attention to what people ask you after. If people are asking you things that seemed like they should be obvious, that is usually a good indicator that the obvious, isn’t really that obvious.

The more you talk to people about what you do, the better you will get at explaining it. Never stop practicing.

Next Friday, December 16 The Capital Network is teaming up with MassInno and LaunchPad for an interactive Pitch Practice and competition event. You will get to work one on one with LaunchPad members to practice your pitch and hear feedback. The company with the best pitch will win a $100 gift card, just in time for holiday shopping! More Info

A recent TCN alumni, Relay Technology Management has announced a collaborative partnership with Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Relay are building a unique software platform that will provide next generation predictive analytics to the transactional licensing markets in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. The partnership will allow Relay to leverage Nature’s resources and content to sell their SAS platform to biotech and pharma companies.

I spoke with Dave Greenwald about this partnership and how TCN helped them get to where they are today. Dave participated in our Venture Coaching program as well as our regular programing with a season pass.

” TCN has been supportive of Relay since we won the Tufts Business Plan competition in 2008. Through the competition we received a free season pass and took full advantage and attended lots of the events.” - Dave Greenwald, Ph.D. CEO and Co-founder of Relay Technology Management, Inc.

One of the major benefits that TCN was able to provide was to introduce Dave to Jeff Arnold. Jeff was able to give lots of personal insight and advice to Dave which really helped them along in their business.

“TCN has helped us be a higher quality company and has helped us be more attractive to investors and other programs” - Dave

The software product is being launched in the 1^st half of next year and Relay are currently working with 2 of top 10 pharma companies. They want to work with other biotech and pharma companies. Currently the company is in beta testing.

Click here for a copy of the full press release.

Earlier this week life science entrepreneurs and life science professionals all gathered at Nutter McClennen and Fish for a half-day bootcamp that was an intense study of everything a life science company needs to know to get started in business.

Topics ranged from building the business model to protecting your IP. For a taste of what our Venture Fast Tracks are like you can see the short video clip below. In the spring we will be hosting another Venture Fast Track that focuses on all high growth startups.

Are you a life science company and missed out on the Fast Track? Join us next week for Accounting 101 for Life Science Companies hosted by Moody Famiglietti & Andronico in Nutter’s offices.

This was originally posted on Dan Allred’s blog Volume Game. You can view the original post here.

I look at lots of financial plans, and I often help entrepreneurs think through their financial modeling. One of the questions I get a lot is whether a financial plan should be based on a tops down analysis or a bottoms up analysis.

In my experience, a bottoms up analysis is much more valuable when it comes to operating a business and checking the vital signs of a business such as progress versus plan, performance to expectations, hitting key performance indicators, etc.

That said, you need to do a tops down analysis as well, but that analysis should be a quick exercise to help determine which markets are attractive to your business.

Here’s how I think about building a financial plan:

Step 1: Conduct a tops down analysis of the market where you intend to do business. This analysis should tell you whether the market is attractive enough - i.e. big enough, dynamic enough, etc. - for you to pursue it.

Step 2: Assuming the market is attractive enough for you, build a bottoms up financial plan that illustrates what your penetration of this market will look like - from the perspective of both revenue and expenses.

A good bottoms up financial model is the reality check to the excitement that comes from a tops down analysis of a really attractive market. More than that, it is a management tool for your business because it forces you to think through the performance metrics that will be key value drivers for your business.

Let’s take a look at what it looks like to build and use financial models in the way I describe above.

Tops Down Analysis

A tops down analysis typically starts with an estimation of how much money is spent in a particular industry on an annual basis. This information can be gathered from analysts such as Gartner and IDG or from industry trade groups.

These figures often include practically everything spent within an industry, although they are more helpful approximations of the true attractiveness of a market when they can be narrowed to the market segment that is directly relevant to the product or service that you are developing. It makes sense to spend some time on this because 1) better analysis of the data is going to be helpful to you as you think about your financial and marketing plans, and 2) prospective partners, investors, etc. are going to challenge you on your assumptions about the market.

Many businesses are targeting multiple markets and therefore need to conduct this exercise several times over. The results will be helpful as you begin to build a bottoms up model as it will help you prioritize markets and decide how to deploy your finite resources to attack each market.

Bottoms Up Analysis

The key to the bottoms up analysis is the assumptions you make as you build the model. Think of a bottoms up model as building a house. You make some key assumptions about customers - how long will it take to close a customer, how much will each customer spend with you, how long will you keep them, etc. - and these assumptions lay the foundation of the house. These assumptions really drive the model as they drive the revenue build, which is probably the primary long-term value-driver in your business (along with profitability). You also make some assumptions about how you will attract and convert these customers. Think of these as the walls of your house, what people see when they look at your company. These sales & marketing assumptions will help build out the expense portion of your bottoms up model. Finally, you need keep your house safe and make it livable for your employees, shareholders and customers, so you need to invest in IT systems, financial oversight, legal counsel, human resources, insurance, etc. These general & administrative expenses are like the roof and plumbing of your house - not the parts you spend a lot of time thinking about but very important nonetheless.

Here is some advice on how to think through each assumption category:

Revenue assumptions
- Think about the types of customers you have and build an assumption case for each type of customer.
- Think about the products that you have and how they are priced. Which products are each class of customers most likely to buy, will you be able to upgrade them to higher priced products or sell them additional products? If so, when?
- How long will you realistically keep these customers? How much money will you make on them over that time period - subscription revenue, maintenance revenue, upgrades, upsells, cross-sells, etc.?
- How much does it cost you to deliver your products and/or services to your customers? Factor in any variable cost into this section of your bottoms up plan as cost of goods sold (COGS). These would be expenses such as material costs, implementation costs, customization of software, etc.
- Are there network effects or other inflection points in your business that allow you to either charge more or deliver your product at lower cost? If so, make sure you build those revenue enhancements and efficiencies into your plan as you achieve the relevant milestones (probably closely related to a certain number of customers).

Sales & marketing assumptions
- Lots to think about here. Most fundamentally, how do you sell your product: direct sales, inside sales, ecommerce, channel sales, OEM, etc.? The answer to this question has significant bearing on the assumptions you make here as it affects how you market your product, who you employ to sell the product and how much cost is associated with each of those employees.
- Think about your sales funnel and relate it to the assumptions you made above about the number of customers you plan to attain. For each of those customers, how many sales people need to be involved and over what period of time? And how many other potential customers do they need to talk to in order to land one - i.e. what is their realistic conversion rate?
- In a somewhat related assumption, how long does it take a new salesperson to come up to speed before the assumptions you made above about their effectiveness is relevant? Factor that in.
- Where do all of these prospective customers come from - i.e. what does the very top of your sales funnel look like? If you have a channel strategy, how do you develop this channel and what costs are associated with that? If you have an inside sales force, how do you generate leads for them to pursue - inbound marketing, SEO, SEM, etc. What costs are associated with this? If you have a direct sales force, then chances are you have a more complex sale with a longer sales cycle, not to mention more expensive sales people, so factor this in.
- Building out this portion of your bottoms up model should be a good exercise for you and your team. This is a reality check for both the revenue assumptions you’ve made as well as the tops down analysis you completed. This bottoms up plan should give you a blueprint for how you will attack the market and what kind of resources you will need to do so.

General & administrative assumptions
- This should be a small portion of the expenses for an early-stage company and will grow over time as the business becomes more complex, requires more oversight, third party opinions, etc.
- Think about the systems, services, policies, etc. that you need and ask around to get an idea of the cost assumptions you need to make around these items. Our market has many great resources for outsourced G&A services, such as finance, accounting, human resources, etc. Taking advantage of these resources will help you get experienced people on your side without committing to the expense of full-time employees. There are also many service providers , such as attorneys, bankers, real estate advisors, etc., who are accustomed to working with start-ups and willing to tailor their services, fees, etc. to the needs of a start-up with an understanding that they will grow into a more traditional relationship as your business scales. So ask around (and ask me)!

In my estimation, your bottoms up model will require at least 15-20 times the effort of your tops down analysis, but it will add real value to your business. If done properly, a bottoms up analysis will tell you: 1) how much capital your business requires in order to reach the revenue & profitability objectives in your plan, and 2) how to manage your business according to the key metrics that drive value in your business, as you would have thought about all of these metrics up front when you made your assumptions.

Dan Allred is a Senior Relationship Manager at Silicon Valley Bank. To hear more from SVB professionals check out our Expert Lunch hosted by Silicon Valley Bank on Debt Financing Options.

This was originally posted on April 19 by Micah Rosenbloom on his blog. View the original post here

Timing is everything – especially when it comes to raising a round of capital. My Founder Collective colleague Eric Paleyand I discuss (and debate) it often. Here are some observations having been an advisor to two recent TechStars companies and co-founder to three start-ups.

Be weary of the artificial timeline

Both Brontes and Novophage are classic university ventures. They started in labs, later received university and government funding (Deshpande Center, BU’s office of Tech Development).Both companies went on to win or place in the finals of highly regarded business plan competitions at Harvard, MIT, Duke, etc. It seemed opportune time to raise capital, but the businesses were still not ready. While business plan competitions are excellent catalysts for founding teams, and useful for gathering feedback, they do not ensure that a business is ready to launch (even so for winners/finalists).

Any process that sets an artificial timeline – expiration of government or university funding, graduating from school, a business plan competition or the conclusion of an incubator program does not inherently mean it is time to raise money. All businesses need to incubate at their own pace. Early market pivots, prototype development and building the founding team should generally happen on the founder’s nickel.

Fundraising = acceleration not inertia

All too often entrepreneurs approach fundraising as the start of the venture. This attitude often leads to disappointment. A business should be operating as a regular business – with the makings of a culture, meeting routine and infrastructure (Novophage had 6 gigs of in its Dropbox before fundraising)!

Capital is invested to accelerate a business that has initial momentum but has reached a point where only money can get the company to the next accretive, and risk-reducing, milestone. VCs use the terms “traction” flippantly but in essence what investors want to see is momentum before the fundraising. At Brontes, we needed a clear market focus (dentistry) and industry advocates before we were really ready for a Series A raise.

But strike while the iron is hot …

Having said all this, timing truly is everything. The investment community is momentum driven, just like the stock market. You’ve got to have a nose for when the timing’s right. A strong signal from a VC often suggests its time to talk to many and leverage the interest to terms sheets. If your segment is “hot,” find those pre-disposed investing actively in the segment you’re in.

In the end, the sequencing of fundraising often has a significant bearing on the outcome of the process.

Micah Rosenbloom is the Chairman and CEO of Novophage. If you want to hear more from Micah he will be a panelist during the Life Science Venture Fast Track on November 8, 2011. Early bird ends October 26 so so get your tickets now.

Posted by Dave McLaughlin

The hardest investor money to get is the first check. That starts the wheels turning. With Vsnap, the video messaging startup where I’m CEO and Co-Founder, I built a little wrinkle into the financing that put real money in the bank within two weeks of my going out to investors.

Speed matters a ton, especially for consumer internet startups. And with a small team, there’s a high opportunity cost to seeking investor money. Please don’t misunderstand me – finding aligned investors takes time, and this is the last thing in the world that you want to rush. But there is a point of diminishing returns and the more you get beyond that point, the greater the price you will pay.

Personally, I’m not confident that I have enough investors in my network who are comfortable with convertible notes, so I chose to price Vsnap’s seed round. I see this as me optimizing the process for speed and quality of partner, rather than for some illusory perfect price.

How did we set a price? We looked around at what other teams were getting and picked something in the middle. We gut-checked that with a few investors and a few entrepreneurs. We figured in the option pool from the founders’ share. We worked through the current dilution and sketched a range of scenarios for future dilution. We measured the total raise against our P&L then grilled ourselves on whether it would give us enough runway to generate the proof points to raise an A round. We tweaked the numbers a bit. And that was our price.

What matters most to me is that we get great investors with a minimum of bullshitting each other, and that the founders and the team retain enough equity to land key players in the future and to be deeply, viscerally engaged and incentivized through the dilution of future financings. Whether that’s precisely a pre of x.x or x.y…I don’t sweat that so much.

Now here’s the little trick, which I used to buy me the time to focus intensely on product and team – rather than on financing – through our alpha pilots and now approaching our beta launch.

We simply discounted the first half of the round.

I don’t often hear of people doing this, but it is not at all complex legally. It wasn’t a huge discount where the second half investors feel they’re getting screwed. Just enough to create a carrot and introduce a bit of urgency.

The result: three investors wrote meaningful checks within two weeks.

And we just kept right on running hard. We launched our alpha and ran pilots in the US and Europe. We’re about to launch vthankyou.com with some awesome celebrity partners, providing our alpha product to help people say thank you to America’s veterans. And our beta will launch in November, web and iPhone – with an amazing integration that is going to create tons of value for our users.

And now I need to get back to raising the rest of the seed round!

Dave McLaughlin is CEO and Co-Founder of Vsnap, a simple video messaging tool that helps consumers and businesses drive action from the people they communicate with. Formerly, he was Co-Founder of Fig Card (acquired by PayPal) and Boston World Partnerships.

This is a presentation created by Joe Medved a digital media VC with SoftBank Capital. You can read more from him on his blog: JoeVC

I have helped a number of our portfolio companies at SoftBank Capital build financial models over the years. This presentation walks through the construction of a general business model for early stage companies, with a focus on core revenue and expense drivers.

Want to learn more about turning your business idea into a fundable business model? Join us for our breakfast roundtable on October 19: The Capital Network Breakfast Roundtable: Building a High Growth Business for Angel and Venture Capital at the Foley Hoag Emerging Enterprise Center

Participate in the Pepperdine Private Capital Market Project. This year survey respondents will have access to over $600 in discounts.

What effect will the recent U.S. downgrade have on lending and borrowing? Will lenders choose to qualify even fewer loans to privately held businesses – historically their bread and butter borrowers? Will private business owners experience even more pain as reluctant lenders become more skittish? Pepperdine University seeks to learn how private businesses and lenders view their outlook in these uncertain times.

The Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Project invites capital providers, lenders, appraisers, bankers, and private business owners to complete its Fall 2011 survey. The survey will be open online between August 29 and September 16 at http://bschool.pepperdine.edu/pcmsurvey.

Complete the online survey starting August 29 and receive our comprehensive report before its public release in November. Also:

• Save 50% off the purchase of D&B CreditAdvisor™ from our research partner Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. The offer will be good from August 29 through December 31, 2011.

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Promo codes for the Expo, Certificate program, and DNBi® CreditAdvisor will be provided upon completion of the survey.

Pepperdine’s ongoing research reports on the current climate for accessing and raising capital, including the conditions influencing the decisions of senior lenders, asset based lenders, mezzanine funds, private equity groups, angel investors, and venture capital firms. Our one-of-kind data provides the cost of capital in each market segment and helps you make better investment and financing decisions.

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Please take a few minutes and visit http://bschool.pepperdine.edu/pcmsurvey between August 29 and September 16. Complete our confidential survey and be the first to receive the results.

More information about the Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Project and access to the Summer 2011 report can be found here: http://bschool.pepperdine.edu/privatecapital.

This post was originally post by Timothy Bernard Jones on buzzient.com, on August 9 and has been posted with his permission. You can view the original post here

With the public equity markets in turmoil, one of the drumbeats I’m hearing is how private companies either:

A. Need to file and do an IPO as quickly as possible (for later stage companies)

or,

B. Need to raise as much VC as possible and stockpile it away while keeping the burn low(a la the Sequoia ventures presentation from a couple of years ago) until they can go public

What’s lost in this discussion is the critical question “Why go public?”.

So many startups and founders seem to be focused on getting an IPO, without asking themselves whether they really want to manage a public company. Especially right now. So few people realize that because of SEC Rule 144, insiders (save a few, but that’s another issue) don’t get to sell for 180 days. In that first six months, everyone in the company adds a stock widget to their desktop, and much productivity is lost daydreaming about the end of the lockup period.

In the interim, all sorts of crazy market and world events could take place that would hammer the stock lower and lower. Looking at the news over the last few days, I can’t help but think that insiders at a variety of recently public companies are banging their heads against the wall in angst.

Look at the Nasdaq right now. There are number of companies with cash flow machines as businesses that are getting pounded by the public markets. In times like these, being public exposes the company to the vagaries of the market and the volatility therein.

I think any founder really thinking about the long term has to consider staying private, and building a valuable company outside of the mood swings of the public market. Liquidity can be achieved in a variety of ways, from shadow stock to secondary sales, all without having to be publicly traded.

By thinking of staying private, founders can focus on really building solutions that help customers and a culture that inspires employees. I’m oft reminded of one of the best software companies around where this principle is manifest: SAS, the analytics giant in NC. #188 on the Forbes list of largest private companies, SAS has built a $2B+ revenue company without having to deal with Wall Street. The founder Dr. Jim Goodnight, pioneered many of the principles of building a totally supportive work environment; SAS provided on-site child care and other services long before most valley companies even dreamt of doing so.

Back in the 70′s (A decade we’re going to look more carefully at with this global financial/demand crisis), plenty of great companies stayed private and built value. Only when the go-go equity culture of the 80′s/90′s took hold did we see this crazy sense of urgency to go public. I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of two companies that have gone public; in both cases the IPO date was a bit anticlimactic. You STILL have to build a business.

So, looking at the tale of the tape, I can only think that like the 70′s, staying private is about to come back in fashion. Hopefully it’ll end there, and we won’t see polyester shirts, pleather, or bell bottoms again…;o)