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By VStart, on April 15th, 2010
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations Workshop Friday, April 23, 2010 at 3:00 p.m. UC Davis Conference Center 2nd Floor Conference Room
The Office of Research, Office of University Development, and the Foods for Health Institute are hosting a workshop on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Explorations Round 5.
Grand Challenges Explorations awards of $100,000 support early-stage research projects designed to overcome persistent bottlenecks in creating new tools that can radically improve health in the developing world. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a Phase II grant of $1 million. Topics for Round 5 of the Grand Challenges Explorations include:
By VStart, on April 6th, 2010
Micromidas has just completed its first major round of funding, having raised $3.6 million. The funds will be used to deploy their technology at the pilot scale.
Micromidas, based in West Sacramento, develops and scales environmentally benign biological and chemical processes that produce valuable chemical and material commodities from waste biomass. The first Micromidas application for their technology is scaling a process that converts the carbon in organic wastewater into PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate), a family of bio-degradable plastics that can be used in lieu of conventional petroleum plastics. Their process generates highly functional bio-plastic while simultaneously reducing the quantity of bio-solids that municipal utilities must pay to treat. Micromidas is Read More »»
By VStart, on March 29th, 2010
Senator Dodd’s current financial reform bill is designed to address financial reform and regulation of the big banks, including the “too big to fail” issue. But it may have unintended consequences by reducing the number of angel investors while at the same time putting regulatory hurdles in place. These hurdles will increase the time it takes (yes, even more!) for entrepreneurs to raise money, and put more bureaucracy in the way further discouraging angel investors.
There is a post on VentureBeat today that has more details and discussion. That post also has some good summary information on the SEC rules that relate to all Read More »»
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 Read More »»
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:
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 Read More »»
By VStart, on November 2nd, 2009
Many startups with high growth ambitions immediately think of raising money from angels or VCs. This can be challenging for first time entrepreneurs, and if family and friends money is not an alternative, then the choices left are often credit cards or bootstrapping. Here is a post on the top 10 lessons in bootstrapping from VentureBeat.
There are two ways to build a business: Raise a bunch of money or bootstrap. When I was in business school, there wasn’t much attention given to the bootstrapping notion. The “MBA way” of growing a business is to write a business plan, raise money and then execute the business plan. But I think that’s almost always the wrong approach.
We bootstrapped Infusionsoft for several years before ever raising capital. The lessons we learned were, and continue to be, invaluable. Here are the top ten lessons we learned from this method – and why I continue to evangelize bootstrapping to entrepreneurs: … Read More » »
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