Yesterday afternoon, as I listened to Connie Miller of Pivotal Presentations describe the visceral, physical and sheer animal angst associated with public speaking, I couldn’t help but feel that Robert Palmer was really on to something.   Your throat is tight, you can’t breathe, you might as well face it: you’ve got stage fright.  As Connie described to our workshop participants, it’s not at all uncommon to experience these symptoms and more when you face a crowd that, on some primal level, you fear will attack you. The good news is that unlike Palmer’s love addicts, you can be saved.  Below please find a few take-aways from Connie’s session (no substitute for her personal coaching and some highly interactive exercises she included in the workshop, but here goes).

1) Breathe. Yep, turns out you need oxygen for brain function, and to project your voice.  DO try this at home, kids: place on hand on your sternum, the other on your diaphragm (stomach region, for the non-biologists in the crowd). As you breathe in, your belly (not your chest) should actually expand.  This opens and elongates the air column, and is an incredibly powerful tool.  Next, as you exhale, count to seven out loud. When we get nervous we tend to take quick, shallow breaths…your voice can crack, sound shrill, or just fade away. Make sure your breaths are deep enough so that you can sustain this counting exercise and even punctuate the number 7.   Land on it with some authority. Go ahead, try it. I’ll wait.

2) Personalize. Get past that fear that a pack of bloodthirsty animals is ready to pounce by comfortably resting your eyes on a few individuals in the crowd.  We’re not talking about darting, furtive glances….you’ll look paranoid and actually make your audience nervous, too.  And it’s not about a staring constantly at the one smiling face in the crowd (see how long they stay smiling– ick).  Try focusing on one individual at a time, for long enough to complete a sentence (or two). The goal is to shift your gaze as you move onto the next thought.

3) Be clear and compelling. No secret that it’s important to say something meaningful, and to convey confidence in your convictions.

• Don’t do that Lloyd Dobler “nervous talking thing,” but know that it’s a basic human (or at least American) instinct to fill that uncomfortable silence with noise. Take a quiet moment when you get on stage, plant your feet shoulder width apart–yes, breathe–size up the room, and begin.
• Tell a story, involve the crowd, and use your body language to suggest that the very physical space in which you’re standing is where this riveting story occurred.
• When you answer questions, if you don’t know, don’t BS, say you don’t know. If you need a moment to collect your thoughts, it’s a good practice to repeat/rephrase the question (could actually be a benefit to the cheap seats in the back row who didn’t hear it the first time).  Many nervous presenters can be taken aback by questions, and literally take a step back….try leaning into questions from the audience and show you’re listening intently.
• Avoid the trap of text-heavy slides. The human eye won’t necessarily read top to bottom, left to right, so you may soon find yourself very disconnected from your audience.  If you have to have bullet points, she suggests bringing them in one at a time. And by all means, make them pretty (she points out we are animals after all, and drawn to color. I think I may have been a fish in a prior life– I like shiny).

As the workshop wound down and Connie took brave souls from the group to practice what she’d preached,  Sean Flynn commented “This is just like the advice I get on my golf swing.  If I work on one tip, I forget all the others.”  Fair point and to be expected!  Through repetition you’ll integrate one piece at a time.

And now for a little color commentary from the author:

1) Get over yourself. I’m not suggesting have some kind of out-of-body experience while public speaking, quite the opposite: you need to be incredibly present.  The point is that no one’s speeches are ever perfect– sometimes you, say, hurl a remote clicker into a guest’s bagel and schmear at Breakfast Buzz, for example– so don’t let the small stuff phase you.   Roll with it, laugh it off, and likely no one will remember those little flubs (except the woman in the second row who got a bit more than she bargained for with that bagel).   In addition to Connie’s tips, you’ll find your own way to get over this kind of anxiety.  My path was dance (other people’s choreography) and karaoke (other people’s songs)… as I was getting past my own teen (and, thirty-something) angst, I found it easier to do so by taking on some other persona and getting used to performing.  However, borrowing words and movements from others isn’t really sustainable in public speaking…as you need to:

2) Find yourself. Authenticity is a big deal.  Be sensitive to audience (knowing your audience is the golden rule for any performer), and avoid being overly technical or jargon-y when speaking to a broader group. Do your best to speak in their vernacular.  That said, use your voice, your vocabulary, your movement, to its best advantage.  It’s great to have role models and mentors– but take what you like and what works for you, and make it your own.

3) Be yourself. To humanize what can either be an impersonal or brutally animalistic experience,  don’t stop at finding those individuals in the audience,  bring yourself into the mix. It’s much easier to connect when you’re sharing your own, flawed humanity. If your instinct is to smile, do it. Laughter can work too (but try to stop short of giggling or the crazy-making Joker’s cackle).

Whether you take any of this advice to prepare for the Oscar’s, dinner with the in-laws, an investor showcase or industry event, hope to see you soon.  And I’ll buy a drink for anyone who rocks out Robert Palmer at the next techkaraoke (as we pour one out and honor that two-hit wonder’s memory). Much love.

We can’t resist the opportunity to give another shout out to the twelve companies who presented at our third First Look Forum event yesterday, and the whole community of folks who made it possible! Both John Cook of TechFlash and Greg Huang of xconomy did some incredibly thorough write-ups of the afternoon showcase, so we’ll just chime in with some context around the program itself.

What is this event anyway? The forum itself is the end of a two-month application, screening and coaching program, but we hope just the beginning of a new path for these diverse companies!  Our twelve participants receive mentoring from a pair of coaches (primarily investors, with a sprinkling of serial entrepreneurs), a presentation workshop, and a personal coaching session from Pivotal Presentations.  The “piano recital” at the end is a great place to meet potential investors and advisors, but past participants have raved equally about the coaching and the big day.

What do these companies have in common? Our theme is innovation. It’s not all IT or Web 2.0 all the time. Remember this event is brought to you by the organization that featured the founders of Bacon Salt as keynoters in our signature Entrepreneur University!  Every company selected to present in First Look Forum had a unique value proposition and was at an inflection point in their business:

1. a local business, profitable going concern for 8 years, changing the game and going national
2. a travel-oriented company re-emerging from hibernation and hoping to take the industry by storm
3. a graduate of the Founder’s Institute embarking on the fund-raising adventure
4. a grant recipient and perennial UW business plan competition participant who met their first investor at FLF!   (scroll down for their identities!)

What else? None of these companies had done the dog-and-pony show to the membership of an organized angel group, nor received venture funding, so First Look Forum was their coming-out party.  Are these companies ready for investment?  Many will be in the next 6-12 months. This may explain how we can attract investors from some 20 investment groups, including: Alliance of Angels, OVP, Seraph, The Tacoma Angel Network, Founders Co-op, Divergent Ventures, Ignition Partners, WRF Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Voyager Capital, Integra Ventures, Puget Sound Venture Club, Keiretsu Forum, Zino Society and more.  In addition to serving entrepreneurs with coaching and connections, we provide a service to the investment community in sourcing early deals for their organizations.

The flip side of the coin of having ’something for everyone’ is that not every pitch will resonate with every investor.  We support innovative entrepreneurs of every ilk and are happy to showcase the many local flavors!  The home of Microsoft, Amazon, Real Networks and Expedia has also enjoyed decades of innovation from Boeing and Starbucks… NWEN members reflect this unique potpourri.

What did we take away from the big day?

• Always be closing: We believe every one of these companies had “steak” (one, literally ground into dogfood and frozen)….but the audience voted with their coins for some of the pitches that really “sizzled.”
• Investors will vote with their feet. From my time with the Alliance of Angels, whether a company is in materials science or software, deals get done when they have that needle-in-the-haystack advocate who steps up to lead.  Being genetically pre-disposed towards match-making (yes, I’m a yenta), it was incredibly fulfilling to see investors huddling with presenters in corners of the room during our reception.   Successful entrepreneurs create their own luck, but we can help them get lucky by bringing together a diverse set of investors and deals, adding a healthy dash of showmanship and a soupcon of alcohol.

Answer key below. Congratulations to all the presenters, finalists, runner-up and grand-prize winner, and thanks to the entire community of volunteers, coaches, and investors for supporting the area’s innovators!

1. Darwin’s Natural Pet Products
2. Inside Trip
   
3. Zendorse
4. Empowering Engineering Technologies
   

A gloves-off debate at our March 12 Breakfast Buzz on “Funding: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” inspired me to dust off my old Seattle 2.0 post on the topic, and the first-date interview questions below are as timeless as such classics as “So do you have any siblings?” or “How long have you lived in Seattle?”

Friday morning, our moderator, the ever-provocative yet still charming Dan Shapiro, asked panelists Charles Seybold and Robbie Cape about what to seek out/avoid in investors. Most of the discussion centered on angels, but our fearless moderator had a couple comments on approaching VC’s. I’ll paraphrase below:

1. Size matters. Don’t be shy, go ahead and ask about fund size. And if you’re feeling bold, ask how much of the fund remains to be deployed. This should signal a bit about whether the size of your round fits their fund profile.

2. Timing is everything. You’re on a roll now, so ask about how far along they are in their fund (8 years in on a 10-year fund? They’ll have an expeditious exit on their mind, which may be better-suited for later-stage deals or quick flips). And on the subject of timing, ask about their preferred investment stage…seed? early? growth-phase companies?

Now to reprise the David Letterman-style Top 10 list. Knowing that your powerpoint presentation is like a first date with angels, usually the goal is to get a second date. But there are lots of fish in the sea, and I’ve found it a good idea to phone-screen potential suitors before that first date. Ask more than “is your money green?” Try the below:

10. What are your fees to entrepreneurs? Your time is money, but money is money too…make sure the fee structure is transparent. The range of fees is significant, from under $200 up to $6000.
9. No, seriously, what are your fees? This is the part where you ask about application fees, presentation fees, cut of proceeds, or any additional obligations or hidden fees throughout the process.
8. How long does it take to close the deal? From submitting an application through due diligence, getting funding from an angel group may take longer than you expect (or like). Turn-around times range greatly from group to group, and expectations should be set for how much time will be required, and over what period of time.
7. How much money did your forum invest last year? Not how much investment did your network facilitate, not “how much did your members invest in start-ups in general”, but “what was the dollar figure of investment made only by your members in deals that you screened?”
6. In what stage of company does your forum invest? What is your profile of investments by industry? If you make the tough decision to seek equity funding, one of the perks is that professional, active angels want to invest not just their money, but their time…and can be a much-needed shot in the arm to your advisory board. Find out the group’s experience with high-tech, consumer, retail, or real estate industries…and seed, early stage, post-product, post-revenue, or growth stage companies. Does the group have members who both understand and have an appetite for your deal?
5. What is your track record? This can be a tricky one, as angels invest individually, at different times, but beware fuzzy math. Investors (and entrepreneurs) get returns upon exit, not with a VC round.
4. Of the companies that presented, how many received funding from your members? Don’t be shy about asking for the average and range of investment either.
3. If I present to your group, how many investors will be in the room? This is an opportunity to ask not just about attendance but about their membership base….accredited investors? Active and experienced angels? Or service providers and hangers-on?
2. What’s your deal flow? How many companies do you meet with every month? How many companies presented to your organization last year? Since your organization’s inception?

And as much as results matter, so does the experience…..so:

1. Can I contact any companies who have recently participated in your process?

For some best practice recommendations, check out this link on the Angel Capital Association web site. But don’t just read about it– ask! What they answer– and whether they answer– will speak volumes.

On a personal note, for a first date, the author recommends coffee or happy hour, never dinner. If you like the date, you can always have dinner afterwards…but if you start with dinner, you could be in for 90 minutes of sheer misery.

You already know the elevator pitch is critical to your business, not just for pitching but to crystallize the goals of the company in your own mind.

You might also have developed a one-line positioning statement — a single sentence that defines the company in a simple, clear, sentence.  Not one you’d use on customers, but rather something to tack on your wall, something that all marketing and communication should be working towards.

The Venture Hacks blog teaches us about something even smaller and tighter — the high-concept pitch. The idea is to boil your message down to a short phrase that references existing, successful products. Examples:

• “YouTube is Flickr for video.”
• “LinkedIn is Facebook for business.”
• “Twitter is Blogger for Attention Deficit Disorder.”

I like brevity, but I don’t like the high-concept pitch. It leaves out so much it becomes ambiguous, possibly with unintended consequences.

Let’s make this concrete. Say I’ve invented a new compact, portable projector:

This projector weighs less than a pound and it’s the size of a cell phone. It uses bright LEDs so you never blow out a $100 bulb. Your sales guys don’t have to haul equipment or plug into projectors missing “yellow” that can’t run at their laptop’s resolution. This projector works 100% of the time and is small enough to get through airport security in your jacket pocket.

That’s my product pitch — contains all the details and reasons to buy it. Now for the positioning statement:

A compact, portable, rugged projector that eliminates surprise problems on the road.

Short and sweet, still including the primary features and benefits.

Now it’s time for the high-concept pitch. Here’s an idea, copied almost exactly from the Venture Hacks article:

iPhone for projectors

This sounds good at first blush. iPhones are known for being easy to use, pretty, coveted, and commercially successful. Also the analogy extends to size and portability. Good!

But these aren’t the only attributes of the iPhone. iPhones have a reputation of not working well with Microsoft Office, something particularly troubling for the travelling salesman. Readers of this blog are likely to use GMail and Open Office, but your typical salesman is on a strict diet of PowerPoint and Outlook. Just yesterday I spoke with a business traveler who has avoided the iPhone specifically because of its lack of integration with Exchange (now fixed).

iPhones are notoriously inflexible and not customizable. They bucket you in a culture. With the v2.0 software debacle, I could even include “buggy.”

When you use only three words and when you invoke something well-known and complicated, it’s not clear what message will be received. I’m brevity’s biggest fan, but there’s such a thing as “too brief.”

No, I’ll stick with Eric Sink’s definition of positioning statement as the fundamental particle in my marketing universe.

P.S. Another weird quote from that article is that “for investors, the product is nothing.” I get the point — that product != strategy, and product strategy is more interesting to investors than feature bullets. But still… “is nothing?” Perhaps intentionally exaggerated to make a point, but if you find an investor for whom this is literally true (and I have!), steer clear. Strategy with zero product understanding isn’t strategy.

P.P.S. Healthy disagreements notwithstanding, Venture Hacks is a must-read if you’re interested in funding or selling a company.

P.P.P.S. Someone should make that projector!

Jason Cohen wrote this post and allowed us to syndicate it. He is the founder of Smart Bear Software, maker of Code Collaborator, the world’s most popular tool for peer code review and recent winner of the Jolt Award.

A business plan, an elevator pitch, a pitch deck — the number of different things you have to have to successfully pitch your company is amazing. Now add in the one pager. Whether you call it that or an executive summary or a company overview, it’s an essential part of the whole story. Like the one-page resume, you want a single, concise one-page document that you can hand to potential investors and business partners. There are lots of advantages to having it be a single page, but I’m only going to mention the most important one — investors expect it.

To create my one pager, I started with my five-page business plan. I went through and highlighted all the most important stuff, then consolidated that in a new document which ended up about two pages long. Then I started looking for things to trim. I was pretty close to finished when I decided that I should make sure what I was doing was consistent with what I needed to submit to another competition, the Willamette Angel Conference (although I’ll be at a disadvantage because Groupthink isn’t an Oregon company, I figure the extra connections will be worth it). It was at that point that I realized I’d made a mistake. The Willamette Angel Conference uses Angelsoft, and the whole way it works is different — your one pager gets created by filling in a form on the site. Here are the items you’re asked for:

• One line pitch
• Summarize your business
• What specifically makes your management team most qualified to build this business?
• Define customer problem
• Describe the solution you sell
• Define your market
• List your current or potential customers
• Sales and marketing strategy
• Describe your business model
• Describe the competitive landscape and list your competitors
• Define your competitive advantage and list barriers to entry

Each of these items also has a longer explanation you see as you’re filling out the form. For example, the explanation for “Define customer problem” reads: Investors fund pain killers, not vitamin pills. What critical customer need does your company address? If you are a web company, you may need to make a hard decision here on whether to talk about your audience or the people who will ultimately pay you (like your advertisers). You only get 210 characters to answer that one. When you’re done, Angelsoft turns your information into a one page summary that looks like this sample:

At first, I was thrown for a loop, but then I realized that this was a much better way to do it. After all, investors looking at your one pager have a bunch of questions in their head that the’ll use to decide if they want to read anymore. If you don’t answer those questions, it’s over. So the number one task really should be to make sure you answer those questions!

In the process of answering the questions, I managed to get in every one of my key points and pretty much nothing extraneous, but the document wasn’t exactly what I wanted to best represent the company. For Angelsoft applications, I have to take what I get, but that’s not true for NWEN or other investors. So, after I finished up the Angelsoft process, I took all the information and created a new document that I could edit. Then I made a few changes:

• Combined the one line pitch, business summary, and customer problem into a new opening section which read better than the three individual sections.
• Combined target market and customers sections.
• Combined competitors and competitive advantage sections.
• Added a little bit of additional detail in a few places where I’d been constrained by Angelsoft’s character limits.
• Added a (small) illustration to help explain the product.

In each of the cases, I made the change to improve readability or punch. But, overall, it’s a lot like the one pager from Angelsoft. You don’t have to do your one pager like I did and your executive summary might be longer. Garage.com recommends two to three pages in this excellent article. But, whatever you do, keep these things in mind:

• The purpose is to sell your company to investors, not tell them everything about it
• You want to convey the excitement and the energy behind your business
• To the extent that you can, answer the questions potential investors will have before they ask them

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

I’ve gotten a lot of advice on my slide deck for the NWEN First Look Forum competition. So much advice, in fact, that I followed it too well.

The first versions of my business plan and my pitch deck were so focused on the product, the technology, and all the cool things that we’re doing for customers, that I neglected to talk enough about the business. I talked about how the technology scaled, but not how the business scaled. As one of my advisors said, investors will assume your technology will scale — they want to know how the company can grow to be a billion dollar business. And I’d made the same mistake in other areas. The pitch deck (and the pitch that goes with it), initially had a lot less about the business side of the business than the business plan, so, off I went, removing technical stuff, and fleshing out the business side. It was looking pretty good.

Then, I went to my first coaching session with my NWEN advisors. We went through the whole deck and they gave me a lot of great feedback. When we were done, they asked a few questions, including a key one — what’s exciting about this? When I explained what I thought was exciting, they both responded, practically in unison, why isn’t that in the pitch? It turns out that I had over-corrected, by a long shot. I had spent so much time working on my weaknesses that I had given my strengths short shrift. I wanted to make sure that everybody knew the business was solid, that I had basically left out what was exciting about the business in the first place.

In the final deck, I lead with the big vision and the long-term plan that is a key part of the excitement, then I segue to the first product and the customer pain that it’s all about. The pain is a bit less exciting, but it’s compelling. Elsewhere in the deck, I make sure to revisit the things about the business that I think make it really exciting. And, I try to talk about technology only where it directly relates to customer pain, solutions, or growth. The result is a significantly better pitch.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

Who is more likely to produce long-term shareholder value — the entrepreneur who raises too much investment capital, or the entrepreneur who funds growth through profits alone?

First time entrepreneurs often have skewed visions of “how it all works”. Their perceptions are often shaped by the numerous successes that get touted about the media, rather than by the 1000-fold number of failures. It makes the “accidental success” of YouTube appear reachable, or at least “just as likely” as any other startup.

One of the things that entrepreneurs usually believe is that once they have an idea, they need investment — that’s just how it works, right? Once they start to talk to investors though, as well as advisors and other folks in the startup community, the questions usually come up … is this a lifestyle business or a “swing for the fences” big market opportunity? A “lifestyle business” is one which you intend to keep running for a decade or two — like my Dad’s optometry practice, for instance, or my brother’s event audio/visual recording business — typically an owner-managed business in which the profits are used solely to support the ongoing lifestyle of the proprietor.

Then there are the “swing for the fences” big market opportunities. These are the startups with big goals, where the entrepreneurs focus on a market opportunity >$100M. To get there, most companies on this track sell ownership in their company at some stage of their business to raise the capital necessary to build their company. Some companies even raise huge amounts of venture capital, at a hefty dilution mind you, before they even arguably HAVE a business. (Twitter comes to mind …) Investors are compelled by visions of a healthy return on their investment, and in the latter case also by extremely savvy entrepreneurs.

For whatever reason, I’m NOT a “lifestyle business” kinda guy. I’m only interested in building a company with a compelling market value and resulting shareholder ROI, but as a founder I’m ALSO uninterested in immediate dilution down to single digit % ownership. I want as much equity in the company as possible.

I learned long ago that the best way to build personal wealth and shareholder value is through “bootstrapping”. Bootstrapping is the art of building companies with very little outside capital/investment. I’m proud of my bootstrapping skills actually, which I’ve developed over four startups now, yet I’ve also realized that outside capital is also essential to developing/realizing a substantial market opportunity.

The reality is that there is a middle ground. Bootstrapping your way 100% to IPO, while honorable, is very difficult and uncommon. If the market opportunity is truly there, being under-capitalized will usually result in missing the market window of opportunity. Conversely, raising too much capital too early rarely results in long-term shareholder value. In other words, given a large market opportunity — a startup that raises too much investment capital is just as likely to fail (to generate shareholder value) as a startup that doesn’t take any investment capital.

I’ve been building Others Online based on what I thought to be an appropriate balance of equity financing and bootstrapping (”sweat equity” financing). Unfortunately we’re still not profitable and thus reliant on investment capital at a time when the market opportunity is large and we’re landing large customers, but market conditions are unstable and investment capital has dried up. And the other day I was talking to one of my investors, who literally wrote the book on bootstrapping, about our status as a company. He insisted that there “has to be a way” to generate more cash from our pipeline immediately. The only way I can see to do that is to shift our business model in the short-term, and I worry that doing so may negatively impact our ability to achieve the “big market opportunity”.

I keep thinking about this. Is it possible to “swing for the fences” (big market opportunity) at the same time as focusing on 1st base (getting to cash flow breakeven)? Or are the two incompatible? I suppose it depends on the market opportunity, but I’d argue most high-value windows of opportunity in the market are open for a limited period of time. Rarely do you not have competition eyeballing the same opportunity, and sufficient funding is generally a prerequisite to nailing these windows of opportunity.

Market leadership positions are always attained as a result of execution. Financing is not execution. However, financing provides the means to develop the necessary components to execution: team, timing, marketing, and product development. Since paths to success are rarely a straight line, financing also helps recovery from bad decisions (on any of the above). Under-capitalized companies are therefore at greater risk. That said, bootstrapping is also essential. It teaches you to make your mistakes quickly and therefore least costly. Bootstrapping is good execution.

2009 is going to be a difficult time for companies who are “swinging for the fences” but aren’t financed for the next 12-18 months.  If you’re one of them, like we are, it seems you can only either change your game plan and just focus on 1st base, or merge your team with a team in a far better position to hit the home run.

Jordan Mitchell, the author of this post, blogs regularly and is the CEO/Founder of Others Online (his 4th Internet startup), which provides ad networks with behavioral profiling and targeting solutions.

It’s 4AM and I just sent out copies of my 5-page business plan for the Northwest Entrepreneurs’ Network’s First Look Forum to a bunch of advisors, plus a few extra people who I haven’t previously solicited advice from. It’s so easy to wait to finish something until right before the deadline, so I deliberately set my own deadline three days early so I’d be able to get some feedback before I have to submit it.

If you’re still working on your own plan, here are some thoughts from my process:

• I’ve been pitching my business concept and long-term vision to people for months now, but where does that go? Strictly speaking, it’s not an answer to any of the five questions they’re asking. I ended up putting parts of it in each of the first three sections (Market/Opportunity, Novelty/Concept, and Scalability of the Business Model).
• Similarly, in discussions with people, a decent amount of technology has been discussed — what I’m using, why, what’s good about it, what were the alternatives, etc. Almost none of that made it into the document. Investors want confidence that you’ll make the right technical decisions. They don’t need details on those decisions.
• The addressable market, funding needs, sales projections — if I was a business person, these probably would have been trivial. I think I did a reasonable job and, in this document, a lot of detail isn’t required.
• Competitors — there’s an often discussed trap of saying you have no competitors. It’s like a catch-22, though. If you have exact competitors, you probably don’t have a viable business. I pointed out competitors and how none of them are doing exactly what Groupthink is. I did not have room for one of those market charts, but, when I do one, I’m thinking of putting Groupthink in the middle — Papa Bear’s on one side, Mama Bear’s on the other side, and Groupthink is in the middle, just right.
• Scalability — don’t confuse scalable technology with a scalable business. I wrote about both.
• The Team — gee, it’s just me right now. I wrote about both my own skills and experience as well as my search for a CEO.
• Even if you’re not applying to the First Look Forum, this is a great exercise. I put a lot of stuff down on paper that I’ve been saying over and over again. Now I have the opportunity to really refine it.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the version I sent out, but I also fully expect that I’ll be making major surgery on it once I get some feedback. And, of course, when I wake up, I’ll have at least half a dozen things I’ve realized on my own while I slept. I predict I’ll be busy until Friday.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

A fascinating new study posted today indicates that successful serial entrepreneurs have a 50% greater chance of success in subsequent start-ups than either first time entrepreneurs or those whose first venture failed. These individuals were also more readily able to raise venture capital funding and did so under less onerous terms than first-timers.

While on the face of it, Professors Paul Gompers and Josh Lerner are delivering sobering news to first time entrepreneurs, there is a silver lining. The pair outline strategies for newly minted ventures to increase their chances of success by partnering with previously successful founders. Successful entrepreneurs demonstrated particular skill in the areas of market timing and effective positioning of the start-up as a “sure thing.”

Read about this new study in an HBS article on “The Success of Persistent Entrepreneurs.”

A great way for first time entrepreneurs to gain some of the advantages of prior success is through participation in NWEN’s new Mentor program which matches early stage founders with experienced entrepreneurs in an unstructured venue for advice and coaching.

This article was posted by Seattle serial entrepreneur and NWEN Board Member Hoyt Prisock. He is currently incubating two new businesses in the tech sector and blogs at Bigshoebox.com.