Lea Boyea of Freshtracks Capital gave a presentation the other day at the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies about the many questions that are asked of a start-up company before they receive venture capital funding. I thought this was particularly well presented. Although Lea claims that the nine questions are not original, I searched in vain using Google to find another mention of them, so until I hear otherwise, I’ll credit them to Lea and Freshtracks.

These same nine criteria could be modified to fit non-profits who are looking for grant funding. If you want people to give you money, you have to be in a position to explain why they should consider it.

Here are my notes from the session handouts.

Management Team
Completeness of team
Domain Expertise
Growth Company/early-stat expertise
Previous successful exits
Previously raised investment capital?
Interest and wilingness to bring in active investors

Market Opportunity
Size of Market
Growth of Market
Fragmentation of Market
Is the market likely to have one, a few, or many winners?

Value Proposition/Consumer Pain
What Is the problem being solved
How painful is the current process for your customers
How willing/anxious will they be to switch from their current solution?

Technology (Product/Service)
What is the unique technology that you are providing with your product or service?
10 x less expensive or 10x more effective than competition?
How revolutionary/evolutionary is it?
How proprietary is i?
Can it be protected via trademark, patents, business secrets?

Business Model & Go-To-Market Strategy
Make it once, sell many times
No real estate, restaurants, or retail
Distribution strategy
Sales process and Sales cycle
Scalability
Pricing/ Recurring revenue? Margins?
Financial Projections
5 year Profit & Loss Revenue, Direct costs, Gross Margins, SG&A, Net Profit
Balance Sheet which inofrs cash collection cycles and working capital requirements

Competition
Who are your competitors?
How are they solving this problem differently?
What are their unique attributes?
How well capitalized are they?
What kinds of competitive hurdles will you bump into in the sales process?

Valuation and Capital Needs
Pre-money valuation? Percentage of company ownership?
Capital needed in this round of financing?
Capital needed in future rounds of financing?
Common Stock sufficiency/equity incentives

Deal Dynamics
Terms and Conditions
Timing
Co-Investors
Deal Structure
Governance- Board Composition

Exit
What is the likely exit sale to financial or strategic buyer, IPO, recapitalization?
If acquisition, who are the likely acquirers?
What time horizon
Expected multiples?
Return on investment?

I attended the one day Microsoft seminar on Windows XP, hosted by Sean Liming. A bit of confusion at the start, according to Sean, The Big M had extra marketing money in the budget toward the end of the fiscal year, and hired him to do several of these one-day sessions. His company charged $99.00 per session, so apparently of the 22 or so people who had signed up, all but three or four of us dropped out after realizing they were supposed to actually pay something. Too bad. It isn’t often that you get to have a session with a top authority and consultant for that price. He has written several books, and also publishes software tools to help enable the process of building XPe images.

I covered Windows Embedded XP last year about this time and mostly the platform hasn’t changed. Several new points of interest emerged:

1. Windows Embedded is a teeny-tiny portion of the overall business at Microsoft. Changes and updates are infrequent, and the crudeness of the tools reflects this…they don’t put a lot of resources into Embedded.

2. Working with XPe is not particularly fast or facile. The problem does not lie with the programmer, it is just the nature of the software. (but, have you ever recompiled a Linux kernal?)

3. Vista embedded which was announced vaguely many months ago, is currently way off into the future, not least because the footprint will be larger.

4. The marketing people are making a name change, which seems really stupid. If I’ve got this right, XPe becomes Embedded Standard Edition, and Windows CE becomes Windows Mobile. Or something like that. Stupid.

5. Windows CE, is designed for hand-helds and cell phones and is really a different animal from Windows Embedded. People who have attempted to use CE when they should use Embedded, because of the lower licensing cost have been disappointed. The incentive is there, however, as the runtime for an instance of Windows Embedded is $90.00, where with CE it is $3.00.

6. XPe is really a componetized version of Windows…you can pick and choose which pieces of Windows that you really want.

7. If you include the Windows installer component, then you can perform a install of application software after generating the XPe image. This was a revelation to me….I thought you had to have everything componitized from the get-go. This knowledge was worth the price of the seminar to me, and it has caused me to take another look at attempting to generate a base OS for installing our applications.

I’ve basically gone off Thomas Friedman, but his May 4th column has a great summary of the missed opportunities of the past several years. We seem to have repeated many of the mistakes of the seventies and eighties, in many cases with some of the very same leaders who screwed up the first time around. But the final paragraph deserves a comment…

…because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”

How about we enlist ourselves? Many have come to the realization that leadership on the national level is an oxymoron. Our national institutions have been co-opted by lobbyists, and corrupted by the Bush administration. In areas of demonstrated need there has been no engagement. (New Orleans). Corrupt? How else can you characterize an administration that puts polluters in charge at the EPA, or who guts reports from its own NASA about the issue of climate change? The next president (if they choose to accept it) will have the slow task of trying to rebuild trust in our government among our citizens and throughout the world. It won’t be a thankless task, perhaps, but it will be a slow one.

Fortunately, the states aren’t waiting, in areas like health care and energy policy. Individuals shouldn’t wait as well. Let’s just hope that the next administration, whether Democratic or Republican will just stay out of the way.  As usual, it will be individuals, non-profits and NGOs who will show the way forward. 

What is all the fuss about Cloud Storage? This is the notion that you can store all (or some) of your files in the internet “cloud”…i.e. online using some kind of paid service from Amazon (S3) or any number of web services. Aside from the fact that this could be considered a security nightmare if left unmanaged to network users… “er, sorry, I stored the 3Q budget figures in the cloud, and now I can’t remember the password”… there are existing alternatives that you already have available and for which you may already have paid:

1. If you use Google Docs, your documents are stored in the cloud
2. If you use BaseCamp, your documents are stored in the cloud
3. If you have a web site, you have the ability to use FTP to transmit your files and store them in a presumably permanent and secure place.
4. How about a thumb drive? Your personal cloud.

So the idea of paying $4.95 a month extra to store files seems ridiculous.

Total Direct Costs 

In the spirit of Jerry Pournelle, “we read these things so you don’t have to”, I find among 6 (six!) pages of fine print sent to every poor schlub who subscribes to Verizon’s DSL service, the following points of interest:

Section 4.3
Restrictions on Use. The Service is a consumer grade service and is not designed for or intended to be used for any commercial purpose. You may not resell the Service, use it for high volume purposes, or engage in similar activities that constitute such use (commercial or non-commercial). If you subscribe to a Broadband Service, you may connect multiple computers/devices within a single home to your modem and/or router to access the Service, but only through a single Verizon-issued IP address. You also may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time for the Service, or use the Service to host any type of server. Violation of this section may result in bandwidth restrictions on your Service or suspension or termination of your Service.

Section 10.4
Monitoring of Network Performance by Verizon. Verizon automatically measures and monitors network performance and the performance of your Internet connection and our network. We also will access and record information about your computer and Equipment’s profile and settings and the installation of software we provide. You agree to permit us to access your computer and Equipment and to monitor, adjust and record such data, profiles and settings for the purpose of providing the Service…