I can’t believe that I wrote Part I of this series over a year ago. How time flies!

So, what has happened? Well I had a baby, that sort of ate up a few months of my time. Back on track now, we’ve been noodling through some new venture ideas lately, with the hope of acquiring investors to fund them. This has thrown me back into the “To Get VC or Not” journey. As I mentioned in my last post, our structure and approach is a bit unorthodox, coming at ventures with an established team and business, with the hope of building out not just one great idea, but many. It’s not a model that you really see, so instead of wasting my time and anyone else’s time moving in this direction, I made a really good decision. I asked for some advice.

I decided to reach out to some of the connections that I’ve built up over the past six years and ask some pointed questions on what could work and what definitely won’t work when it comes to attracting investors. I had the opportunity to connect with a former client, who also happened to be a serial entrepreneur, tech start-up CEO and angel investor based in Silicon Valley. He was gracious enough to answer some of my questions and offer some valued advice. (more…)

Ah, the age of microblogging. As much as I enjoy sharing snippets of my day, a sentence or two, lately I have found it really irritating to be limited to a finite number of characters. On Sprouter.com today I was challenged to keep my biography to 140 characters. Really? Have you read my bio? It’s a novella. Not long after, on Meetup.com, I was restricted to 250 characters when introducing or “applying” join a new group. Then there is the mother of the microblog, Twitter, with 140 characters, which is easy enough when you are reporting what you had for lunch.

So, here we are. The BLOG. That’s right, I can write as much as I want to! I might post a poem by Walt Whitman below, just because I can. I suppose there are pros and cons to the microblog challenge.

Pro: Short and Simple

There is absolutely no room for unnecessary adjectives, adverbs or run-on sentences. As an English major, I spent four years jamming sentences full of so many fancy words to meet a word count. In fairness, whittling your thought down to the essential points can be really beneficial. As a CEO, if more than three sentences come out of your mouth without a “point” to them, I’m already annoyed. Skip the fluff, spit it out and let’s move on! (more…)