On November 14 T.A. McCann presented at the NWEN breakfast meeting, providing all who attended thoughtful and interesting perspective on starting a company, focusing on a single purpose, raising capital, operations, etc. I particularly enjoyed his “magic quadrant”. T.A. blogged about presenting, so I thought I’d include what he wrote in addition to a link to his blog post and slide deck …

Early this morning, I presented at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network breakfast. NWEN (www.nwen.org) helps people start companies by giving them tools, connecting them with service providers and making connections to other people, advisors… and I love that. This was a chance for me to summarize my thoughts and experiences (to date) and connect with other entrepreneurs. I always learn something when I do these kinds of events, both about what I have done right/wrong in the past and how I can be better in the future. Here is a link to the PPT that I presented, a continual work in progress.

I also met a bunch of really interesting people working on cool ideas. Thanks to Jared and Peter for setting up the event and to everyone who asked me such good questions after the talk. I look forward to the future discussions and coffee meetings.

If you have questions or follow-ups you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or send plain old email (tam@gist.com) and I will do what I can to help.

T.A. McCann serves as founder and CEO of Gist. His past experience includes Vulcan Capital and Polaris Venture Partners, where he was an entrepreneur-in-residence.

This morning I had the privilege to attend the NWEN breakfast featuring Susan Scott, CEO of Fierce, Inc. and author of the best-selling book, Fierce Conversations. Her presentation was actually quite interesting. (truth: I had expected it to be a bit fluffy and was really only there for the networking)

The main idea behind her talk was that business is really just a conversation. In fact, all relationships in our lives are really just deep conversations. And if that makes sense to you (as it does to me), then you realize that every conversation that you have has to power to radically alter your life; for better, or for worse. In fact, it might even be the conversations that you are NOT having that are having an impact on your life.

As an example, she talked about the young married man, who, for the life of him, could not figure out why his wife was always wanting to talk about their relationship. “Didn’t we just talk about this?” was always his thought. “Wouldn’t it be easier if we had just one really big conversation about our relationship, and then we could just kind of coast for a year?”

As some years passed, he eventually had a breakthrough and realized that the conversation that his wife always wanted to have wasn’t about the relationship, it WAS the relationship!

Think of this another way; if your conversation stops with your wife or business partner, what happens to the relationship? I’m sure you can do the math.

Trent Dyrsmid is the author of this post and Founder of Dyrand Systems Inc., which provides community banks and credit unions with a virtual IT department. Trent blogs regularly at trentdyrsmid.com and lives in Seattle.

Not too long ago NWEN held their annual Early Stage Investment Forum. I could only attend in the afternoon, and I missed a great video (shown during lunch) with 4 local entrepreneurs on starting a company, raising money, pitching at a conference, etc. Extremely well edited, and I think they do a good job capturing the challenges of startup fund-raising. (FYI - my company presented at ESIF last year and it was definitely worth our time!)

Great job to Sam, Alyssa and David! (I don’t know the other guy.)

Jordan Mitchell, the author of this post, is the CEO and Founder of Others Online, his 4th Internet startup. Others Online helps Web site publishers and networks better understand, target and monetize their audience through the use of proprietary affinity profiling software. Jordan blogs regularly and tweets even more!