Steve Job's Speech in Stanford Ceremony

Great speech by a great entrepreneur. (Thanks to Lisa)

Recap: VentureForth's 4th Annual Entrepreneur Conference

Thank you everyone who attended this event. It was a great time listening to great speakers on a variety of subjects and meeting new people who share the same interests. Dr. Irwin Jacobs was a great speaker on how his entrepreneurial spirit was the driving force of Qualcomm and helped create a wireless technology cluster here in San Diego. The finance panel was one of the best panels, mainly because, the panelists are good friends with one another. Unfortunately, the finance panel does not have video, because the tech guys could not get it to work. Ingrid Vanderveldt was also another great speaker by giving hope and taking a chance of your dreams. She is such a nice person and she gave a wonderful speech. I was the chair for the Web 2.0 panel, which I thought was a great success as well. Everything went smoothly and Paul Kedrosky is the expert and has done tons of panels on this subject. I was not able to attend the engineering or media, but I will be watching them on our conference website www.ventureforth.com/conferences/econf through Real Player. The VentureForth team did a great job putting everything together and making it a successful conference.

A couple important notes, if you a undergraduate student interested in VentureForth, you can contact me at james.lu@ventureforth.org or lisa.chung@ventureforth.org. Keep checking back to see what we are doing. Our next conference will be the Biotech Entrepreneur Conference in May 2007. Keep an eye out for that.

Where Can You Raise Money for Your Startup

I found this article talking about different sources of funding to start your own business.

How funding works: So startups are abandoning venture capital. Why?

An insightful article on "startups on a shoestring" in the New York Times covers the rise of companies running on angel investors, loans, or even credit cards. It's a switch from the more famous method of raising piles of venture capital from a firm. But what does that mean? It means startup founders get to keep more of their money and power.

Startups raise money in rounds, often taking on multiple investors per round. Here's how the major types of funding work:

Venture capitalists

• A VC firm raises funds from investors, then invests it in startups, usually at upwards of $1 million per company (and sometimes as high as $12 million or more).
• A VC firm is buying a share of the company -- anywhere from a tenth to a third, depending on how much the firm decides the company is worth before the investment.
• If the company needs more money a few months later, the firm may invest again, or a different firm might invest. Companies often raise funds from multiple firms in one round.
• VCs want at least three times their money back, though they expect most deals to fall through
• Many companies only take VC funding after they've used up the funding from their...

Angel investors

• These are often the first investors in a company, most always used before venture capitalists.
• Angels invest a few thousand dollars. As with VCs, several angels may invest in a startup at once, for a total round of anywhere up to about $1 million.
• They have less of a business interest but more emotional involvement.
• Angels can be friends and family of the investee, but some startups raise a preliminary friends-and-family round.
• Or they may go even smaller and rely on...

Personal credit

• When is it healthy to run up a 20%-interest-rate debt on plastic? When it's cheaper than running up a 200%-interest-rate debt on VCs.
• Of course, you could also rely on your own cash reserves, as many startuppers do with their second companies -- Evan Williams, for example, who used his windfall from selling Blogger to Google to buy out the investors in his new company, Odeo.
• Ironically, credit card funding is a far cry from other way to borrow from banks...

Hedge funds

• The 90s bubble was partly blown up by VCs, but the big money came from hedge funds -- an adventurous form of private investment fund.
• They're not as involved this time -- the money's too small, at least for now -- but they powered many a startup in the 90s, when more tech-savvy VC firms hadn't dominated the Silicon Valley funding industry.

"So why are startups avoiding VCs? Because they're finding that angels, friends and family, and personal credit are less demanding funding sources, with lower expected returns, giving founders the freedom to take it slow and stay in control. Of course, VC money is hard to resist after a year of bootstrapping and dining at McDonald's."

If you click on the insightful article, it goes to the NY Times talking about how Meebo, online all-in-one instant messenger, started their company.

BTW: If you are looking for funding, the 4th Annual Entrepreneur Conference will be the best way to network with VC, angels, and others. Again, it will be on Saturday, November 18. 2006, at Cal-IT2@UCSD with two great keynote speakers: Irwin Jacobs, co-founder of Qualcomm, and Ingrid Vandervedlt, host of CNBC's "American Made." We will have panels on web 2.0, engineering, media, financing your venture. Check out the website and REGISTER.

What Does the Election Mean for Entrepreneurs?

"What are the public policy issues that matter most to small business owners and the entrepreneurial economy they are sustaining? If we look at the research on entrepreneurial development and the opinion polls of small business owners it all boils down to three things: regulation, taxes, and property rights."- Digg
Belmont University
Startup Journal- WSJ
BloggingStocks- Jim Cramer

Businessweek: Best Entrepreneurs Under 25

Check out Businessweek's website about the Best Entrepreneurs Under 25. Also, In one the articles, Help for Young Entrepreneurs, it highlights how to start your journey as an entrepreneur. It states to join college entrepreneur programs (Rady School and von Liebig Center) , student clubs (VentureForth), business plan competition ($50k BPC), business incubators (CONNECT's Springboard), and networking groups (conferences, panel discussion, mixers). This article emphasizes the importance of these groups and VentureForth is the central hub that connects future entrepreneurs to these resources.

REMINDER: Go and register for the 4th Annual Entrepreneur Conference, which will be a great time to network with others that share a common interest in entrepreneurship.