2/1/11

2/1/11

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day and let’s hope…

Good morning, All, and yes, we leave for London later this week (weather permitting, of course) and will be participating in Social Media Week there. And no, we will not be spiking the newsletter and tweets with some fake British accent, not to worry. That would be just too bloody pretentious.

Anyway, the good news: Philly-based DreamIt Ventures has come to NYC, and who’s heading up the new NY office? None other than entrepreneur, investor – and SOS member – Mark Wachen. Congratulations, Mark! Mark is truly one of the good guys. We’ve known him forever and his background: he raised $1 million to launch his own company, Optimost, which he ultimately sold for $52 million. Full story is here: http://bit.ly/eZtFkS More good news: Applications are now being accepted for the program, which runs from May to August 2011. Deadline to apply is March 16 (http://dreamitventures.com/apply/ Best for last (ok, so it’s all good): DreamIt is hosting an Alumni Night on February 15 at Solas and you’re all invited to attend, but you must RSVP: http://www.dreamitventures.com/news/events.php).

Deadlines!

Applications for the Open Angel Forum are due this Thursday, February 3rd. Seems their website is wrong. If you have a company looking to raise money you can apply here: http://bit.ly/fvQfIU Interested angel investors can apply here: http://bit.ly/fAnaPU. Charlie O’Donnell and Brian Alvey will be your hosts for the evening on February 8. The Open Angel Forum (OAF) is dedicated to providing entrepreneurs with access to the angel investor community based solely on merit (and without fees, and to build collaboration between angel investors and to inspire high-net worth individuals to become angels. For more information: http://bit.ly/hFxKBo

Application deadline for the Appy Awards has been extended to this Friday, February 4th. The 2011 Appy Awards ceremony will take place on February 28th at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis (at the conclusion of the first day of MediaPost’s OMMA Global conference – register now!).  The Appys focus on honoring the best Apps in a diverse range of categories, including News, Weather, Photography, Finance, Social Networking, iPad Games and many others.
Enter your winning App by Friday, 2/4 – FINAL Deadline! To learn more about the Appys, check out the complete list of categories.

Don’t forget to register for Social Media Week, no matter where in the world you happen to be. There are nine cities participating Feb 7-11 including New York, London, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Toronto, San Francisco and Sao Paulo. To register, visit socialmediaweek.org, pick a city and click on schedule.  Please note that they’re now adding new events almost daily.

Our next Find-A-Cofounder has been schedule, so mark your calendars: February 22nd   More details coming very soon and we’ll tweet the RSVP in the next couple of days…

How do we like the live tweets?  Our friends at Movable Ink are powering the section below. This email will update with the latest tweets from SOSlist throughout the day.  We’ll use it to call attention to breaking news, new events, and things we simply find interesting. Try it out by re-opening this email tomorrow. Warning: we like to tweet ‘em as we see ‘em, and this week and next are hectic weeks: we’ll do our best and of course, it will depend on that all important connectivity. On both continents, but we will try.

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The pieces that caught our attention this week:

We all heard about the Yuri Milner/Y Combinator/SV Angel announcement – that every Y Combinator startup is receiving $150k, if they so choose, and well, a lot of them did choose to do so. But, we thought we’d share Roger Ehrenberg’s thoughts in his Start Fund: No big deal. Business as usual and notes that though the tech press would have you believe otherwise, there are worthwhile companies in which to invest at the seed stage outside of Y Combinator and, shockingly, outside of Silicon Valley. Full story: http://bit.ly/dYCqCC

Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail Based on an Analysis of 32 Startup Failure Post-Mortems We’re a big fan of chubbybrain and they’ve highlighted the top startup failures of all time in the past – which we did posted here in the past (http://bit.ly/9Bocmy). Now they’ve done the work and answered the ‘why,’ including not having a business model, running out of cash, and the #1 reason: being inflexible and not seeking customer feedback. Full story: http://bit.ly/hu48Np

Next: Seed Stage Valuation Guide from Jordan Cooper’s blog, since he finds it strange that with all the VC and Angel blogs out there, nobody seems to explicitly talk about the single most interesting term in startup financing: Valuation. So here’s his step-by-step guide, with the disclaimer that it may vary with geography and past experience of the founding team. http://bit.ly/hhr0Rh

Finally, How To Pitch To A Reporter Venturebeat gives you the roadmap, and includes the different kinds of pitches, including the boring pitch, the rocket scientist pitch, the buzzword pitch – and then some advice about how to do an effective pitch, including that critical bit: get to the point, quickly. Full story: http://bit.ly/ihHIAy

We know not everyone can just quit his or her job, get funded and be off to the races, so Joel Gascoigne, fledgling entrepreneur, contract web developer and UK resident (where moi will be heading later this week – London, not Birmingham. Please.) gives advice on Ways To Bootstrap a Startup On The Side. http://bit.ly/emMcjI

And with that, hope to report next week from London and for your amusement, this seemed a fitting chuckle for this week: http://bit.ly/i1iFGI Ciao or now, and as always, help is on the way…

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