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January 30, 2006
VV Show #26 - Kelly Perdew is the Venture Voice 2005 Entrepreneur of the Year
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Kelly Perdew may have won The Apprentice 2, but the listeners of Venture Voice have given him a new recognition for his entrepreneurial work since then. Kelly got the most votes for the Venture Voice 2005 Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Since we last had Kelly on the show, he’s started a number of new ventures. He announces on the show that he’s launching a new venture capital shop called Angel-Led Venture Partners. We also play your audio votes and get Kelly’s reaction.
3:00 Announcement
- “That was quite stiff competition.”
3:30 Listener vote: Entrepreneurial while working for Trump
4:15 Launching Trump Direct Media
5:35 Listener vote: Achievements since winning The Apprentice
6:25 Kelly’s new book is Take Command
9:20 Listener vote: Kelly cares about the nation’s youth
10:15 Helping the youth
- Kelly is part of Big Brother/Big Sisters and National Guard Youth Challenge Program.
- “It’s still kind of weird to look at this as a quasi-celebrity status where I can impact things just by talking to the media.”
13:00 Downside of being on The Apprentice?
14:15 Launching Angel-Led Venture Partners
- Working with Luis Villalobos, the founder of The Tech Coast Angels.
- “It will enable me to help anywhere from 20 to 35 ventures grow.”
17:45 Working with angels
19:50 Juggling many ventures
21:45 Next three months
- Finalizing filming for the new GI Factory TV show on the Military Channel.
Posted by greg at 12:00 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 25, 2006
VV Show #25 - Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky Win Venture Voice Entrepreneurial Achievement Awards
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The listeners have spoken. Jason Fried of 37signals and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software have won Venture Voice Entrepreneurial Achievement Awards. They came in second and third place out of a pack of over 20 world-class entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed on the show (we’ll announce the Venture Voice Entrepreneur of the Year Award winner next week). It was a close race and you gave us some really impassioned votes. In this show, Jason and Joel give us some hints about what their companies are launching this year. They don’t get to have all the fun -- we play some of your comments too.
:40 Announcement of winners
1:05 Enthusiastic vote
1:55 Indecisive vote
2:50 Votes for Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software
- “See ya!”
4:30 Interview with Joel
- “And I did that without any venture!”
- Talks about CoPilot.
- “I’ll give away one [idea] in case you have any listeners that have a big pile of venture capital and don’t know what to spend it on.”
13:15 Votes for Jason Fried of 37signals
- “They’re not afraid to tell the world what they’re about.”
14:40 Interview with Jason
- “In ’05 we’ve launched 75% of our products.”
- “It’s a good 50/50, current products and new product development.”
- “Campfire is a group chat app.”
- “This is business chat, not dating chat.”
- “Sunrise is a CRMish app for small businesses.”
- “Sunrise is about managing people.”
- “Compass is basically another app that integrates all of our apps.”
- “We want to take this to the masses.”
Posted by greg at 12:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 17, 2006
VV Show #24 - Bo Peabody of Village Ventures
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“Stock lockup” is a term remembered with horror by many entrepreneurs who weren’t allowed to sell their dot com shares before the bubble burst. Bo Peabody founded Tripod, which was sold to Lycos for $58 million in stock. The terms of the sale forced him to hold onto his stock for two years -- while its value happened to increase ten-fold. He also happened to sell his shares just two months before the bubble burst. This lesson in luck was not lost on Bo, who wrote a book titled Lucky or Smart? However, his luck didn’t come out of nowhere. In our interview, he describes the years he spent developing his business even before the Internet was commercially available. He’s now helping entrepreneurs build businesses in parts of the country where venture capitalists typically don’t tread through his venture firm named Village Ventures.
Show notes:
2:15 Starting Tripod during college
- “I spent plenty of time partying.”
- “You’re either born an entrepreneur or you’re not” as he says in his recent book Lucky or Smart? : Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life
4:45 Starting a .com without a technical background
- “Business is fundamentally about getting other people to do what you want them to do.”
- “If you’re an entrepreneur you need to be a B student in a lot of things.”
- Team started with Ethan Zuckerman
6:25 Choosing a team
- “We actually, as a rule, didn’t hire computer science majors.”
8:45 Operating out of Williamstown, Mass.
11:30 Becoming a success
12:15 Where the homepage builder idea came from
13:30 Getting the word out
- “If there was one part of it that I regret, it was that both the press and me worked a little bit to make it [entrepreneurship] seem easier than it was.”
- “It was harder than how we promoted it.”
18:00 Life at Lycos
- Tripod was acquired by Lycos
19:30 When to sell the stock
20:40 Dilution
- “When someone wants to put money into your company at a fair price you should take as much as you can get, because you never know when the market is going to turn.”
21:45 Next step
- Had a friend who started Berkshire Capital Investors
Started Village Ventures with Matt Harris
25:00 Starting businesses outside of major markets
- Best place to start a business: Boise, Idaho
28:30 Is venture capital still necessary to tech companies?
30:35 Google’s and Yahoo’s early aqusitions
32:00 Giving up equity
- “The right place to start is to look to give up 25% to 35%” in an A round.
34:20 Pitching to Village Ventures
- Make a business plan
- Excerpt an executive summary
- Try to get an introduction
37:15 Transitioning from entrepreneur to venture capitalist
- “The only time I miss [being an entrepreneur] is when I’m involved with a company where I look at the CEO and say ‘God, I know I could do a better job than him or her.'”
39:15 Luck in business
- “If you recognize luck then it humbles you a little bit.”
40:10 Entrepreneurial advice
- “Technology does more in 10 years and less in 2 years than we think it’s going to.”
Posted by greg at 5:22 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
