AoA in the Community: November Activities

Having reached over 500 entrepreneurs with variations on the theme of our "10-Minute Pitch" clinic, we thought we'd list some of our pro bono speaking events this month. Feel free to contact us if you are a non-profit or academic institution looking to provide tools to your membership on how to effectively engage the investment community.

November 7, Science and Engineering Business Association, Entrepreneurship Week
“Perfect Pitch” workshop: 2-4 PM, Foege N130A.
In this hands-on workshop, the Alliance of Angels offered engineering students tips on how to structure a business plan and proposal, as well as how to use the language and concepts of business and investment to build a management team. We'll certainly keep an eye out for these entprepreneurial PhD's at the University of Washington's Business Plan Competition.

November 7, Venture Capital Investment Competition Class
Guest lecture at University of Washington, 6:30-7:30 PM
This course is led by Susan Sigl of Seapoint Ventures, and designed to prepare students for the Venture Capital Investment Competition. This now international competition has an 11-year history, and University of Washington teams have taken first place twice in the last three years. Helping students gear up to take back the championship, the Alliance of Angels offered their "Think Like an Investor" workshop to the class, comprised of both MBAs and engineering grad students. Students should be forewarned that should they succeed in winning the $10,000 purse, they'll also be stuck with the bar tab at the competition in lovely Chapel Hill.

November 10, 2007. American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Invention to Venture Workshop.
Seattle Sheraton Hotel, 9 AM- 5 PM
Hosted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and sponsored in part by the Technology Alliance, this all-day workshop was designed for the science, engineering, and technology communities, as a one-day "entrepreneurship boot camp" that teaches technology entrepreneurship basics. The AoA tailored its pitch clinic to a high-impact “Perfect Pitch" presentation, offered to to engineers, student teams, investors, and members of the ASME and NCIIA(National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance).

November 30, University of Puget Sound School of Business and Leadership
Guest lecture, 9AM-10AM, McIntyre Hall, Room 108
In our third visit to Professor Lynette Claire's classroom, we tailored our workshop to a group of undergraduate business students seeking to fine-tune taglines for their start-ups. The "Elevator Pitch" presentation has now been offered to some 60 UPS aspiring entrepreneurs.

WA-The “State” of Entrepreneurship

At the Sleeping Lady Lodge in the old Bavarian town of Leavenworth, the Tech Institute recently conducted their semi-annual retreat, focusing on the state of K-12 education and entrepreneurship here in WA State. A mixture of state legislators, educators, and general movers and shakers in the state came together over cocktails, excellent food, and some more cocktails to work out some of the more difficult questions confronting the state.

The Alliance of Angels participated by putting on an interactive seminar in angel investing getting the audience to evaluate and decide whether to invest in several different early stage companies. One of the highlights of the event was a panel discussion about Entrepreneurial Company Leadership featuring some great up and coming and established CEO’s from local companies. Moderated by Peter Wilson, Engineering Director at Google, the panel featured Jeremy Jaech (Founder of Aldus and Visio and now with Trumba), Rob Arnold (President of Geospiza, Inc), Christina Lomasney (President and CEO of Modumetal, Inc), and Steve Sliwa (CEO of Insitu, Inc).

The Panelists addressed a number of questions about the “competitive advantage” of the Northwest as a place to start and grow a company vs locating in the Bay Area. Several chief concerns in this process were raising funding, finding good workers, the cost of starting and running a business, and the quality of life for employees (focusing on housing prices).

On the first note, while the Seattle venture community has grown by leaps and bounds and is now third in the country after the Valley and Boston in dollars invested, the panel felt that it was still more difficult to get that first VC to bite. While Jaech’s didn’t have much trouble getting funding for Visio (he attributed it to great timing, although after Aldus he obviously didn’t have to go knocking down many doors) he did get all of his funding from the Bay Area and two other panelists mentioned that getting that first investment from the Bay Area helped speed up the process of getting commitments from local VC firms.

On the second point, several presenters made the case that proximity to the UW has been hugely beneficial both in terms of shared resources and research. While Lomasney did mention some real frustrations about getting ideas out of tech transfer, the process has been streamlined in recent years with changes to the ethics laws and more technologies are making their way out as noted recently by John Cook.

Contrasting the cost of starting and running a business in the Northwest vs the Bay Area, Seattle maintains an advantage. While none of the panelists went into great depth about the business costs associated with starting out in WA, Glenn Kelman recently posted a great piece on Guy Kawaski’s blog disclosing his actual financials for the first two years at Redfin vs his original projections. He also addresses what the costs would have been had he started in the Bay Area.

Finally, even with the recent jump in housing prices, the Seattle area is still downright affordable compared to the Bay Area and there is no great danger of Capital Hill passing Nob Hill in terms of prices or snobbery anytime soon.