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By VStart, on February 9th, 2010
 Don’t miss the first annual Sacramento Med Tech Showcase on March 30, 2010 at Sacramento State University. The theme for the 2010 showcase is “Transforming Medicine Through Technology.” Hosted by SARTA’s MedStart Initiative , the event will raise awareness of the medical technology industry and resources in the Sacramento Region and generate excitement about technology developments by companies founded and funded in the region.
The Showcase will feature:
- Exhibit Hall Showcasing Med Tech Companies in the Sacramento Region
- The Next Wave Med Tech Innovators Challenge, co-hosted by VentureStart
- “Telemedicine- New and Exciting Frontiers in Healthcare Delivery” panel discussion
- “Emerging Trends In Med Tech Investing” panel discussion
Join with other leaders and innovators in the medical technology field. More than 350 attendees and over 50 exhibitors are expected!
SAVE THE DATE: March 30, 2010 from 1:00 pm – 7:30 pm. (exhibit hall from 5:00-7:30 pm)
LOCATION: Sacramento State University- University Union Grand Ballroom.
ADMISSION: $80 general, $40 SARTA member
For information on sponsoring or exhibiting at the event, please contact Laura Good at lauragood@sarta.org or 916-261-1873.
By VStart, on March 8th, 2010
Want to know how Venture Capitalists think about valuing your startup company? Here is an article by Scott Lenet of DFJ Frontier, who have a Sacramento office. Looks like formulas aren’t used; rather valuation is based on three things:
- Valuation of deals done on comparable companies
- Investors’ experience, and having the opportunity to see many deals, done or not
- Whether the investment return at the time the company exits (e.g., sells to another company, or does an IPO), under the best circumstances, meets the VC firm’s criteria
The article could lead one to think that a 10 times (10x) return is great for the investor. Well, we are not sure that is universally accepted. Consider the early stage investor (angel or seed stage VC) where maybe only one in ten of their investments really make it; 10x will just get you your money back on your entire portfolio (the great one just makes up for the nine that fail or just muddle along)! We would think experienced investors will have higher expectations!
By VStart, on March 3rd, 2010
Gold Standard Diagnostics, Inc. of Davis has just raised a Series A round from private investors. The company started in 2007 and bootstrapped its way by generating revenue from the very beginning. The capital infusion will be used for a major product launch this spring. Investors included Roger Salquist and other angels.
Gold Standard will be participating in the SARTA’s Med Tech Showcase on March 30th at CSUS and has been able to raise its local profile with the assistance of SARTA’s MedStart, a sister program to our VentureStart.
By VStart, on February 9th, 2010
Brett Owens of Chrometa was one of the first entrepreneurs mentored by VentureStart. We recommended “go get customers” rather than trying to raise money from organized investors. He did that and has been growing ever since with an ever-increasing customer base.
Chrometa maintains an excellent blog and today we saw an interesting post on customer support for software companies and its challenges. Take a look and I think you’ll find that Chrometa have met the challenge well with some good thinking. The very fact their blog talks about this is also great marketing. Go Chrometa!
By VStart, on January 30th, 2010
VentureStart gets many Sacramento region web startups applying for our mentoring. Very often we see great ideas and the need to raise money to hire people to code the idea/application. We normally encourage these startups to get a co-founder, or someone who will work for stock, on the team, and then get some traction before even considering raising money from Angel groups or VCs.
Adam Kalsey, the founder of SacStarts and a VentureStart mentor, recently gave advice on this to one VentureStart entrepreneur and then published it on his blog. We quote it here since it is so relevant to web startups.
Read More »»
By VStart, on January 19th, 2010
We saw a great video today that every startup entrepreneur should take a look at. It is an online interview by Jason Calacanis of Brad Feld. Jason is an outspoken entrepreneur who recently created a huge online discussion about entrepreneurs having to pay substantial dollars to present to Angel investors. Brad Feld is an entrepreneur, turned Angel and VC, who is very entrepreneur centric and has a widely read blog (that’s where we found this).
This video is 2 hours long but the first 90 minutes are really worth listening to. It covers these topics:
- Types of Angel investors and cautions about the Read More »»
By VStart, on January 14th, 2010
The Sacramento Angels, together with the Sierra Angels, led a multi-million dollar financing for San Francisco web annotation startup company, Reframe It. They were joined by other regional angel groups and individual angels. You can read the web press release here, and see another report of the financing gathered, in part, from the filing with the SEC of Form D here.
There are a couple of interesting points for entrepreneurs about this financing. First, you can see that to raise this kind of money from Angels, it takes a lead (the lead negotiates the deal terms, Read More »»
By VStart, on January 7th, 2010
Robb Moore, CEO of ioSafe in Auburn, always does something sensational at CES in Las Vegas. This year, as he did last year, he subjected one of the company’s hard drives to fire, and water submersion, but this time he further ran over it with the tracks on a 20 ton backhoe. Take a look at the video to see if the drive survived. By the way. Robb has bootstrapped ioSafe from day one. Seems this video goes a long way to say a lot a pitch or executive summary would never reveal! Robb is a VentureStart adviser.
By VStart, on December 19th, 2009
We saw this today when we went to check a Google account; and it has been like this for at least an hour! So don’t feel to bad if you have an issue or two when you start out.
Take heart!
By VStart, on December 16th, 2009
Phil Reed was the co-founder of both ComputerLand and BusinessLand, two highly successful startups, both of which went public. He’s raised capital from the top venture capital firms in the world and also been part of small companies that never fulfilled their promise and had to shut their doors (if you ask him, those were the source of the most valuable lessons he’s learned). In fact, Phil has founded or co-founded over a dozen companies during his career and he is incredibly passionate about sharing those lessons and helping budding entrepreneurs.
So here are Phil’s top twelve lessons for entrepreneurs. Call it “Phil’s twelve days of Christmas for start-ups”. (You can Read More »»
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