Summary:  Somehow, entrepreneurs seem deaf on what venture capitalists want to see in the initial documents about a new company.  So, we tossed the question out at the (excellent) “Shaking the Money Tree” panel presented by LAVA—the Los Angeles Venture Association (www.lava.org).  And the answer is:
A PowerPoint “pitch deck” of no more than 15 pages [...]

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You are standing over the brownies and strawberries at some networking function, and a likely candidate for interest in buying your product or investing in your company looks across the chocolate chip cookies, smiles, and says, “I’m Ron, CEO of Everything.com. What do you do?”
So, you get one sentence to state your unique value proposition [...]

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Facebook has the ability for a business to create a unique page for your company. Officially called Pages, they have acquired the common name of “Fan Pages.” Should you create a Facebook Page for your business? What should you consider if you build this type of presence on Facebook?
Benefits of Facebook Pages
Remember, Facebook Pages are [...]

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Investors have a rather straightforward wish list. The catch is, they want all of it filled at the beginning. And why not? Even the small firms read thousands of plans each year, and fund only a few. Larger firms see tens of thousands of plans each year, and fund only a few more. Yes, there [...]

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Effective business planning is more than just talking with your management team about what you plan to do next year. And it’s more than paying someone to write a book about your grand plans too, even if it gets someone to write you a big check.
In fact, effective business planning has nothing to do with [...]

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See PR 101: How to do your own PR for Entrepreneurial Companies  http://tinyurl.com/ykq8can

When your company has expanded and its communications needs are greater than those that can be handled by the president’s assistant on a part-time basis, the next step is to add an experienced full-time public relations staff person or persons, retain an [...]

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How many of you watch television news daily? Listen to news radio as you commute? Read your local daily newspaper? Or the Wall Street Journal?
Have you ever wondered how the stories on people and companies got there? About 75 percent are planted by public relations people. That’s public relations at work, getting companies such as [...]

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As chairperson, I urged the venture capitalists on the panel http://tinyurl.com/yh2jaw7  to tell the audience of early-stage entrepreneurs what they were looking for in companies and in deals.
See part 1, “why it is like it is, now.” http://tinyurl.com/yzdej3x  
Here are some of their favorite things:

2nd generation management: a CEO or a team that has succeeded [...]

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The current capital environment sounds like the news we hear every morning lately about the economy:  “less bad is good” but we are still jobless. 
Digital Hollywood’s venture panel convenes 3-4 times each year, and I am honored to chair it every time during these past many years.  The audience and I get to learn the [...]

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Summary:  The Federal Trade Commission just issued regulations that, in essence, require bloggers (among others) to disclose any “material connections” between advertisers and endorsers.  No one should be surprised:  Restrictions on endorsements have been around for a very loooong time, consistent with the FTC principles of truth in advertising.    It remains to be seen exactly [...]

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