Raising Money from Venture Capitalists

Are you doing the right things to position your business to be funded? Our panel of venture capitalists (VC’s) and entrepreneurs will discuss what compels VC’s to invest in companies today. They will offer perspectives on emerging investment trends and opinions on what the early stage investment markets will look like in the coming year.

Our panel will guide you toward a better understanding about positioning your company to be an attractive investment, including identification of critical milestones needed to gain a preferred entrée to venture capitalists. They will provide insight about investor perspectives, due diligence, and the added investment criteria regarding people, personality, and first impressions in evaluating the team.

The panel will enable the audience to answer some key questions: Are you doing the right things to position your business to be funded? What are the prerequisites to approaching venture capital? Where do revenue and market traction factor into a VC’s funding decisions? Is now a good time to raise venture capital? And more!

Panel:

Rick co-founded TD Capital Ventures in 2001 and Fairhaven Capital Partners in 2007. He has invested in and served on the boards of companies including: Brabeion (acquired by Archer Technologies/EMC), Bridgeport Networks (acquired by Counterpath), Co3 Systems, Dataupia, Everypoint, EqualLogic (acquired by Dell), Prelert, and VeloBit.

Rick held senior marketing positions within the Content Bridge Division of Adero (acquired by Inktomi) and ClearOne Communications (acquired by Gentner Communications and rebranded ClearOne), and held senior engineering and marketing positions at PictureTel (acquired by Polycom.) He has also worked for General Electric at its Corporate Research and Development Center and for Fidelity Ventures.

Rick earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is a Charter Member of TiE, a member of Sigma Xi, and holds a United States patent.

Rick is on the Board of Overseers at the Museum of Science in Boston, and is active with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Massachusetts Bay and Boston Medical Center.

Ed has over 25 years of professional management experience in software and systems. He started his career at IBM in sales, sales management and product management. As vice president of US sales at Interleaf he was part of the team that built the company to $100 million in sales, an IPO and subsequent financings. As vice president of software products for Xerox Imaging Systems, he led the marketing and development of TextBridge, which became the premiere OCR product in the world.

Ed joined Xionics as an executive vice president at an early stage, and helped grow the company to $40 million in sales, building the sales, support, product management and marketing teams that positioned Xionics for a successful IPO. As president and CEO of Profile Systems, he led the company’s success in pursuing vertical markets and solutions, leading to acquisition by Comergent Technologies, where he became a Senior Vice President. A graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, he was a member of the board of eCopy until their very successful sale to Nuance Communications. He is also on the board of HealthWyse and LeveragePoint.

(http://www.ascentvp.com/)

Matt joined the Ascent team in 2002 to continue his work with innovative early stage enterprise IT companies. Matt loves seeing common problems solved using new technology and was attracted to venture capital because it enables him to work closely with management teams over a longer time frame, developing strong relationships. Over the last decade at Ascent, Matt has focused on investments in data analytics (Interactive Supercomputing – acquired by Microsoft and Cymfony - acquired by TNS) and cloud businesses services (HubCast, StrikeIron and The Corporate Marketplace). Matt has worked with emerging technology companies since 1996. He started his career at Alex Brown & Sons, where he helped execute both equity and M&A transactions, working with companies such as BBN, CIENA, DSET, RSA Security and SwitchBoard.com. He then moved to Norwest Venture Partners, where he worked on venture investments such as Broadband Access Systems (acquired by ADC Telecom), Gold Wire Technology (acquired by Intelliden), and COSpace (acquired by InterNAP).

Matt was a double major in computer science and economics at Yale University and has been a self-described “geek for a long time.” He found computer programming to be addictive but realized the business side of the tech world was more his strength and earned an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth (Tuck Scholar).

Additional invited panelists are venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital.

Larry Grumer, President, Energy Harvesters LLC, Managing Director, TAA Corp. (www.EnergyHarvesters.com, www.taacorp.com)

Energy Harvesters is commercializing the Walking Charger™, an “off-the-grid” portable power source integrated within footwear to charge batteries as you walk.

Larry is an expert in the commercialization of technology. He has partnered to launch ten companies, across wireless internet, web 3.0, mobile power sources, propulsion systems, software defined test and measurement, and corporate marketing and engineering consultancies. He is a Phase 2 proposal Grant Reviewer for the National Science Foundation.

TAA is the management advisory and investment firm Larry formed in 1994 that commercializes and capitalizes technology for early-stage technology ventures and corporate spin-outs. Larry is Chairman of the EntreTech Forum and past Chairman of the Boston Entrepreneurs’ Network. He has held management positions at Arthur D. Little, Textron and Foster-Miller. He received a BSME and an MBA from Northeastern University. He has held a Top Secret clearance.