I recently came across a commentary that goes along the lines of VCs know what to do with engineers but engineers don’t know how to deal with VCs. As with all good lists, and entrepreneurs like making lists, it centres around recurring issues for the inventor when dealing with a VC. Issues that are worth refreshing in this author’s opinion:

VC’s don’t sign non disclosure agreements – it affords them protection if they like your ideas, but they want to fund someone else to do them. How do you legislate against that when they have all the financial muscle and contatcts? The answer is it is not just about NDAs and patents but core competencies and brand, so approach with caution.

VC’s are sheep – they will either all fund something or none of them will, so if you have an idea that’s too new and too different you may struggle to find funding. Too right! It’s not just about self promotion, you have to promote your sector and hang a big sign over the exit..

VC’s aren’t technical – they dismiss what they don’t understand, your novel ideas, and they focus on what they know, usually irrelevant marketing terms or growth predictions. If your idea’s too new and different for the expert to understand then you may not get funding. BUT isn’t there much more to achieving commercial growth than building a great product? Have you considered treating your VC as your target customer? Maybe engineers should run the world but they don’t – Deepwater Horizon anyone?

VC’s don’t take risks – VC’s have a reputation as risk takers – they are not. They collect money from rich people to build investment funds. The rich investors take some risk, though their risk is spread across the fund’s investment and is often a tax benefit. Are they solely interested in making blockbusters and sequels? They certainly have a formula and like to stick with it, this is why you need to know A LOT about your investors and choose them carefully. You wouldn’t sell a Ferrarri in a Wal-mart, place your investment just as you place your product and pray you can find some like-minded people with influence and some discretion over the capital in play.

Venture funds are big – If your idea needs a lot of money, then you have a better chance of getting money than an idea that promises the same rate of return for much lower investment. This is because it’s easier for the VC to manage fewer big investments than many smaller ones. True, but most are transparent on deal size, the important thing isn’t how much your company is worth or how much you can spend, but that you spend it well and with purpose.

VCs collude – They price fix by discussing among themselves funding and pricing for candidate start-ups. They will probably between them only fund between two or three companies in an industry – this limits competition and makes success of the few more likely. Absolutely, they hate competition to fund good ideas and the worst thing is they are spoilt, so spoilt they invest next to nothing in enhancing dealflow, how many sponsor or educate & participate in conferences freely? Are they trying to innovate or harvest ideas?

With thanks to Nick Tredennick, Brian Shimamoto and Alan Barrell. To be continued…

Innovation is an ongoing process that your company should be taking a strong stake in, and as an entrepreneur it should always be on your mind. Why? Because as long as you’re working towards goals so are others, process improvements happen all the time, and new ways of doing things will always keep on evolving. If you’re not evolving, you’re in a way killing your business.

Look at it this way, you may have a technology that at the moment can clean water in a manner that is thus far cheaper and more energy efficient than your competitors, you have a decisive competitive advantage because of this technology, however, you know that there are also engineers out there working on similar products, ones that may be cheaper and more energy efficient than yours? So what do you do, you innovate. You look for different processes, different materials, ways to improve the process that will help you keep that advantage.

Today, we look at that relationship, the one between innovation and strategy. In all there are really three ways in which you can approach innovation within your company, and each is designed to work a bit differently. Read the methods, and think about which one of these works best for your enterprise and how you can most effectively apply in.

1. Strategy Defines Innovation – The company collects CI, looks at the market and then defines a strategy, i.e. in 5 years time we want to be at point X, we want to have Y% of the market and be in Z countries. How do we get there. In this scenario innovation effects are pursued to deliver and ensure value to the strategy, and the goal.

2. Innovation Defines Strategy – The company through the most excellent ideas of its board, entreprenerus and others has developed a number of concepts. These concepts are mapped, and a strategic evaluation is conducted based on CI, market factors, etc.. the selected innovation then fuels the strategy of the enterprise.

3. Innovation and Strategy Inform One Another – This is an ongoing dialogue between the two, Innovation and Strategy both affect each other equally, and the C levels manage the process throughout.

In terms of startups and smaller companies, you will find that option two tends to work the best. Why? Because chances are that you’ve embarked on a business venture due to the fact that you had a few good ideas, and chose to pursue one of them. This is the innovation process for those that are starting, or launching something totally new.

With that, your product, service, what have you can be easily augmented and adjusted to suit market needs, additional products, support products can also be added to your product, this is where No.1 comes in. How do you get from A->B how do you grow, and what and where can you innovate to help your business grow.

The last is the hardest to manage, specifically as it needs constant and ongoing attention which most startups lack do to limited resources. In practice it’s strongly supported by larger companies in high-innovation industries, bio, clean tech, hardware & chip design, etc… However that does not mean you should forget about it, Innovation and strategy should always be informing one another, always.

BY JACEK GREBSKI

“Entrepreneurship is like porn, it’s hard to describe but you know it when you see it.” is what came out of the mouth of Kenneth Morse – co-founder of 3Com and former Managing Director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center at the ESADE Forum in Barcelona yesterday, where he is currently teaching and I must say it was a welcome and fresh experience.

The sad truth is that Entrepreneurship in Europe as well as the methodology behind investing and the general mindset lags behind the US not just by a few years, but at what seems at time by decades which is one of the reasons that the team behind this site, 1/2 American, and 1/2 British decided to put it together.

But instead of blabbering on about the European scene, let’s have fun this Friday and convery some of the more exciting, and even funny things that Ken mentioned during his

1. First is first. A line of bull and a power point presentation is no longer enough

DAD > MBBB (Down And Dirty > McK, BCG, Bain & Booz)

2. What are the characteristics of an Entrepreneur?

Integrity, leadership, impatience, quick clock speed, modest ego, willingness to be different, pragmatism, no petty jealousies, drive to solve problems.

3. Five Additional Quotes from Ken Morse

“Don’t Let a good recession go to waste.”
“Sales is the difference between an average company and a great one”
“It’s character building to have one foot in bankruptcy and the other on a banana peel.”
“The ph of an entrepreneur is 1-2 standard deviations from the norm.”
“Engineers need to understand that sales people are not a lower life forms.”

And that’s that for today.

BY F3FUNDIT

Another video this week, this one is from a “did you know” series and talks about the currently somewhat exponential growth in the way that technology is augmenting communication and how the world just keeps on getting smaller. It’s quite interesting and cool to see the way that our world and our species is evolving, and how we’re all working in commonality towards “something”. And notwithstanding, just think about your lifetime, and how much has changes since you were a kid, and where we’ll be in 20-30-50-100 years.

BY F3FUNDIT

We are currently living in some of the if not the most exciting times of humanity. In comparison with previous decades wars are fewer, globalization is increasing communication among all off us us irrelevant of where we are living. Technology is encroaching into, or has already encroached into every tiny little aspect of our lives, sometimes we forget about it, it’s natural we’re living, but for many of us in our 30’s and older, welcome to the future. Did you imagine that we’d have iPhones, Blackberrys, eBook Readers etc… by 2010? I for one always thought we’d have hover boards by now, but aside from my disappointment, it seems that Back to the Future II wasn’t factually accurate.

This video shows how the world is changing and where we’re heading, and how technology is changing the face of our planet.

The More you know 4.0 by Xplane

What do you think? Let us know.

BY F3FUNDIT

Let’s face it, each city of medium size and up has events slated at the entrepreneur, and they tend to fall into one of two categories. The speaker series, or the networking drinks series, but there are very strong underlying problems with each.

Let’s look at Entrepreneurship Speaker Series.

You sign up, you go, you are seated and then you listen to one guy speak for 30 minutes, then the next for another 30, then the third and are eventually moved into a space to network for 30 more minutes. Alternatively, you’ll get one speaker, and then a networking session on top of that.

Great, or is it. Aside from the fact that most speakers lack the charisma of a Barak Obama or Churchill, these series tend to go over time, and if people are sitting in a hall, you’ll find a percentage of the crowd dozing off. If the speaker series extends to two or three individuals this percentage will undeniably go up.

After the event is finished, everyone will huddle around the speaker and try to get a word in, in order to have a bit of face time and hope they’ll remember them. While the rest of the group stands in their corners talking to people they already know. Sounds familiar?

The Networking Drinks Series

You head to a bar, you get a “Hello my name is” tag and you’re supposed to network. But with whom? Who do you talk to, how can you get the most out of it, and what about those people who simply put aren’t good at talking to others, i.e. the introvert/extrovert scenario.

You have tons of these, Drink Tank in London, Founders Lounge in Barcelona, even First Tuesdays succumbs to this. A drinks – event is good fun, but it’s productivity is questionable. Why? Because you don’t know who will be at the event, nor will you know that if there are people there worth talking to you’ll necessarily network with them.

Long story short the current model is simply not efficient – and there are many means for innovation and improvement within events targeting the entrepreneurship sector.

So What About Solutions

Here’s the thing. When you’ve got a speaker, get the crowd involved from the onset, break them up into small groups, whether they know each other or not, it doesn’t matter, have them collaborate – bringing in people from different walks, industries is good, it opens them up to other ways of thinking and problem solving. Don’t make the interaction one way, make it tow way, or event triangular.

When putting on a networking event, don’t just plop people in a room and say network, see who’s coming and pair them up, have a few people putting on the event make introductions, ask people when they sign up, who they want to meet, what they’re looking for. Make the whole thing interactive.

And make it fun, whether it’s a speaker, a networking event, a funding event, what have you, be sure to make it fun, engaging, and provide something that all aprticipants will take away from it, bring valie to everyone involved.

F3FundIt is planning an event for later this year, if you are interested in learning more about it or how you can get involved – please send an email to info @ f3fundit.com with the subject line f3f-event. Thanks.

BY F3FUNDIT

“As entrepreneurs we strive to make the world a better place, we drive innovation, and we lead, though sometimes we haven’t a clue as to where we’re going” so said the entrepreneur.

Today’s video series is about leadership, and how it affects the world, it’s more a think piece than anything else, and we hope you’ll very much like it. We did, and it’s one of our favorite video series so far.

However, as much as we would like to take credit for such an absolutely amazing video we cannot, it comes from the good people at XPLANE a company that specializes in visual communication, and with clients such as the Economist, BASF, UNICEF, Vodafone, etc…, you know there’s something to them.

This video however, comes from a more academic background and was put together in collaboration with Nitin Nohria and Amanda Pepper of Harvard Business School’s Leadership Initiative in order to get people talking about leadership, and what is specifically interesting to us, and the wider entrepreneurship community out there is that the majority of leaders presented in the video were / are entreprenerus.

We as entrepreneurs work every day, to change and make the world a better place, we do this because we see possibilities, and because we love it and have an undying passion for it, and if you do it just for the money, I’ll tell you now, save your breath, you’ll fail. You have to enjoy it.

And with that ladies and gentlemen of the wider internets entrepreneurial and otherwise community, we at f3fundit.com present you with Imagine Leadership

BEFORE YOU SKIP AWAY – THINK ABOUT THE FOLLOWING.

• Am I a leader? And was I born this way or made? What are my strengths, weaknesses?
• Does an entrepreneur have to be a leader, or a leader an entrepreneur?
• What is the defining difference between a leader and a manager? After all managers can start companies can’t they?

We’d love to hear your thoughts?

BY F3FUNDIT

This video series comes from the leader in innovation consulting & design, IDEO. And if you don’t know who IDEO is, it’s all the more reason for you to watch, not only to see these guys in acion, but learn the process behind innovation design and apply some of the best practices to your own products and services.

However, there is another lesson in these videos which is not only about the design process, it’s the mix of individuals that IDEO hires, you’ll see that they aren’t all “designers” by trade, but come from a wealth of backgrounds.

Why is this? Well, I suppose you’ll just have to watch, total run time is about 21 mins.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3