Connection Is The Right Key

For entrepreneurs and investors, connection is the right key to help your business venture a success. And it all comes down to how well you click with people you first encounter. Clicking has always been a subjective art form. Brothers Ori and Rom Brafman, the authors of the book Click: The Magic of Instant Connections, shared their ideas to business owners who are looking to assemble an inner circle of business advisers, venture capital partners, or angel investors they click with. Ori Brafman categorized the ingredients involving "clicking" into the following:

• Vulnerability - Exaggerating how many people you employ or boasting about your revenue will only attenuate the ability to attract investors to help you. Brafman’s research found that people who actually display their weaknesses are the best to click with. Just simply try to hang out with these people and bring yourself a box of pizza or invite them for a coffee without a scheduled formal meeting so you get to know each other as real human beings, is exercising a sense of vulnerability.

• Proximity – The advanced communication technology such as Skype, Yahoo Messenger, or Google Talk, is now widely used for most businesses in meeting with people. But Brafman advices that it is better to show up face to face. According to their research, you definitely click with people you meet face to face, people who are physically close to you. And the most important part of any meeting is what happens just before or after the actual meeting because that is when you take the time to get to know the people you are meeting with as individuals, and the chance to click occurs. That is very unlikely to happen when you are talking to someone on the phone.

• Resonance – According to Brafman, people who resonate are both Present and Flowing. Being present is about showing up as a real person and a fully engaged human being. Flowing is about being challenged while doing something you are really good at. He said that if you are talking to an angel investor, and you are just going through the motions of your elevator pitch, you are toast! People know when you are just acting rather than feeling challenged and being fully present.

• Similarities – You best click with people when you have trivial similarities, such as what sports they enjoy, what school they went to, what gadgets they like and a lot more. However, the number of similarities between two individuals is critical when you are trying to click with someone, according to Brafman. The quantity of commonalities overrides the qualities of those connections according to his research.

• Shared Difficulties – The experience of going through something difficult together and coming out of the other side to safety makes people feel as though they click. Brafman suggests that you acknowledge difficult periods you have gone through with your inner circle in order to stimulate this sensation in a business context.

How to Avoid Scams in Finding a Reliable Venture Capital Partners

It is imperative to know deeper who you are dealing business with. To help you identify potential scammers and find the best venture capital partner, here are some guidelines that must be adhered:

• Try to study the company that you are dealing business with by searching some information on the internet. If it is a reliable financial firm they must have an official website where their physical address and phone number is visible.

• Search the names of every individual that you are dealing with on the phone to check if he or she is legitimate and is not using an alias or code names.

• Verify that the company is registered with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) or to some other Business Bureau Monitoring services. You can also search for more information about the company through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Legitimate companies are also registered with the Attorney General’s Office.

• If they ask for an advance fee for whatever vague deliverables, do not pay right away. That is the main target of scammers, to get your money. You must be provided with a plan first to accomplish your objective.

• Study carefully all the agreements that you have mutually covered. If you still feel uncomfortable and feel like the agreement is something you do not understand, do not sign and seek for legal guidance. You must have an attorney who can review all the documents that you are signing in.

• Use your instinct! If you have doubts and you think you are engaging in business with a company you feel like it is potentially a scam or fraud, you are probably right. Do not pursue your business partnership with them.

One must take note that the history of these potential venture capital partners is also essential, and a seasoned financial firm with decades of experience is very much reliable. These investors must also be much known in the world of entrepreneurship where they have done successful business investments and made hefty commissions in return. And lastly, find the best venture capital partners where you are assured of a long term relationship for future business innovations.

Citrix Startup Accelerator Challenge

Entrepreneur Challenge
by Nathan Jorgensen



This is a really interesting competition for those of you who have tech start-ups seeking seed capital funding.

www.citrixstartupaccelerator.com

The Citrix Startup Accelerator Global Challenge is a focused program for discovering entrepreneurs internationally for direct venture capital investment.  We are looking for the best and brightest new businesses doing cutting-edge work in software technology, especially in the areas of mobile + cloud computing.

A Useful Resource for Entrepreneurs Seeking Venture Capital for Technology Companies

The Founder Institute is a global network of startups and mentors that helps entrepreneurs launch meaningful and enduring technology companies.

Through our four month pre-seed incubator program, you can launch your dream company with expert training, feedback, and support from experienced startup CEOs, while not being required to quit your day job.

Our unique Bonus Pool also shares equity upside with all participants, creating local, teamwork-based ecosystems where great startups can flourish. In less than two years of operation, the Founder Institute has already helped launch over 275 technology companies in over 15 cities worldwide.


www.founderinstitute.com

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Author:

Nathan Jorgensen

Is Your Placement Agent Reliable and Legitimate?

As I have mentioned in my previous blog, Placement Agents play a great role in  the world of business fundraising. In the past, these agents were hired to introduce private equity funds to venture capital investors or to what they call as Limited Partners (LP), and simply congratulate after a job well done. But today, Placement Agents are highly valued advisors who understand and know their limited partners and the market’s appetite for different approaches. They also advise and assist fund managers and help develop marketing strategies. Their critical responsibility is constantly trying to satisfy their limited partners and value their judgment in order to establish long term and deep relationship.

It is imperative to know if the Placement Agent you are hiring is reliable and legitimate. As you know, there was a significant increase in loan scams on the internet perhaps because of the economic downturn lately. Hiring a Placement Agent for your business fundraising needs a thorough background check so you would know who you are dealing business with. For complete details of standard method to identify potential scammers you may check it at Direct Business Lending website.

The Need of Placement Agent in Business Fundraising

In the world of business fundraising, Placement Agent plays a great role in assisting entrepreneurs, private companies, or institutional investors who are willing and capable of investing a private equity fund. Sometimes Placement Agent is an individual but more often a financial firm and they are usually structured as groups within huge investment banking firms such as Credit Suisse Private Fund Group and UBS Investment Bank, or as separate boutique investment banks such as MVision Private Equity Advisers and Campbell Lutyens.

Placement Agent serves several functions for a company such as raise venture capital, mezzanine capital, or growth capital, as well as raise investor commitments to new private equity funds. In order not to spend too much time seeking for its own business capital or growth equity investors, a company hires a Placement Agent so that the company can aim more attention at management issues rather than focusing on how to raise venture capital.

Placement agents are mostly compensated through fees ranging from 1 percent to 3 percent by the companies or individuals who raise capitals. Sometimes their fees and terms of engagement would extremely vary depending on the length of time to execute the fund and based on the amount of money raised. They bring a myriad of relationships with venture capital investors and they can also advise some existing owners of private equity assets on secondary market sales of their interests.

Ashton Kutcher, an Actor and Venture Capital Investor

Who would know that Ashton Kutcher, a famous romantic comedy actor who starred in some big hit movies such as "Just Married" and "What Happened in Vegas?", is the most prominent entertainment figure in the high technology venture capital game, and invested more than his money into it.

He has become a smart early investor in some of the most notable internet startups such as Foursquare, the mobile social network; Path, a photo sharing application; and Flipboard, a news reading application for the iPad. Foursquare may now be valued at up to $80 million, and one of its investors who stand up to gain most is Ashton Kutcher, an early angel investor in this company. He invested his money with Skype, and earned three times his money when the company was sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion last month.

He remains discreet with the size of his investments which he has recently been making through a partnership called A-Grade, a partnership between the manager of Madonna, Guy Oseary, and supermarket magnate, Ron Burkle. People in the venture capital world estimated that his investments would range perhaps from $50,000 to $200,000, just like what other early-stage investors would be investing in.