Similarly, when you pitch to a venture capitalist, this special breed of investor will have questions on her mind.  To gain insight on the mind of a venture capitalist, John Warwillow of  Inc. Magazine interviewed Sam Ifergan, a venture capitalist who invests in tech companies.  His article “6 Thoughts Inside the Mind of a Venture Capitalist” will help you you perfect your pitch as well as improve how you run your business.   Read the article…

Read this article at BusinessWeek to see potential problems for Facebook when a probably “bad” agreement comes back to haunt them when they are really worth something.

Saving money as a startup is usually ingrained in entrepreneurs and spending money on attorneys is not uppermost in their mind (and many have a poor impression of them anyway). But the right attorney is one person on your side to help with the above mentioned items, as well as company valuation and structuring the right deal for investors. They are your best protectors of value and assets, and one business “friend” you can count on.

You will find that many attorneys may strike a deal with you to ease the cash flow burden as you startup with a variety of offers so long as they believe in your potential as a company. Deals can include taking a small stock option in return for delayed fees, and/or delaying fees until you have raised money. Once part of VentureStart we can sometimes recommend regional attorneys to you.

After mapping out the time-line of their product launch, including successes and failures, Chrometa summarizes the lessons learned from their mistakes and offers this advice to entrepreneurs:

Be patient, measure your progress, and focus on the purest fundamentals – namely improving your product, and keeping your customers thrilled.  If you can get these two things right, the rest should eventually fall into place.

Visit Bootstrap Blog:  Anecdotes and experiences bootstrapping a startup from the guys at Chrometa to read the entire post as well as other insightful posts on managing a startup enterprise.

All startups need to communicate their progress with potential customers, investors, supporters, etc. on a regular basis to keep mind share and accelerate interest. We got such a note from Tim White at SacMix today, and you can read it on Facebook. It is a good example all startups should follow.

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.

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!

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.

“Got an idea for a technology product but don’t have the technical chops to build it yourself? You’ll need to find yourself a cofounder.

You’re building a technology company, but have no technology people on the founding team. This leaves you with three options. Hire, outsource, or find a technical co-founder.

It’s nearly impossible for a technology company to succeed by outsourcing their early product. Don’t even think of going that route. Freelancers or outside firms can’t possibly deliver what you want because they don’t actually care about the product or the outcome.

To hire someone full time, you’ll need to pay them a reasonable wage. For someone that’s capable of taking the business ideas you have and translating them to a real working product that won’t fall over as soon as people start using it, you’re looking at at least $80k/year in Sacramento. Don’t think you’ll go get funding and then hire someone. You’re going to need a product before you can get any funding. Gather together whatever funding you have now and hire a developer. It’s going to be important to hire the right person the first time, so if you don’t have anyone who has hired technical people for small teams before, I’d be happy to help you screen candidates.

Your third option is to gain a technical co-founder who’s willing to build this for a cut of the company. Expect to give them 25-30% of the company, but make sure you have a vesting arrangement so some crook doesn’t sign on, take 30% and quit the next day. I can help you screen these people and advise you on how you can structure things with them.

Here’s the thing… You can’t just go out and “find a co-founder” any more than you can go out and “find a wife.” Your co-founder relationship is just that, a relationship. You’ll have a significant relationship with this person, and they with you. Likewise, they’ll have a serious relationship with the business. You need someone to fall in love with you and your idea and to love it enough they’re willing to take tremendous risks in order to be involved. People grow into relationships, they aren’t recruited into them.

So how do you find your co-founder? Same way you found your wife. You meet lots of people. Put yourself out there. Make sure people know you’re available. Date.

Talk about your ideas with everyone you meet. Most people won’t want to hear about it. But some will have feedback. This feedback will shape your ideas and change your business. Along the way, you’ll meet someone with a technical mind that gets just as excited about your idea as you do. You’ll find that the two of you can’t seem to spend enough time talking about the idea and the business. You’ll know that this person is the one.”

Ask Jim Schraith, a noted local angel investor and venture partner with DFJ Frontier! Jim was attending such a workshop last year and thought there had to be a better way of doing board self evaluations. So he founded and bootstrapped BoardEvals.com together with Layton Wedgeworth and Bob Bennett, in the summer of 2008. The product launched earlier this year and they are now seeing an accelerated pace of client sign ups in the corporate and non-profit world.

What do they do? They provide a set of web-based tools that help organizations perform more efficient, effective and thorough board evaluations. BoardEvals replaces the ad-hoc, manual processes used by most organizations today with a standardized, automated board evaluation process that saves time and expenses, while at the same time improving corporate governance practices.