Venture Fairs
I work closely with a lot of entrepreneurs and I’m often asked my opinion of the various venture fairs in the area. The question is urgently important when they need capital to keep their company growing and alive. They are reluctant to invest time and money into an event that doesn’t give them a good chance to connect with serious investors. They hear rumors that some are great, worth every penny, and some suck, stay away.
I’ve been to lots of venture fairs, I help plan and run a few, and I have my opinions and biases. But my purview is limited. I’m sure it would be much more useful to the entrepreneur community to collect opinions and reports from a statistically significant number of people who have experienced a range of venture fairs.
That’s what this post is about. I’m hoping that you will add comments about individual venture fairs, and venture fairs in general. As we get a certain critical mass of comments, I’ll break it up into separate event-specific posts.
I’m inviting comments from entrepreneurs, investors, event sponsors, service providers, and event organizers.
So have at it. Share anything you want. I only ask that your comments be objective and fair. What’s good, what’s bad? What works, what doesn’t? What is it about venture fairs you would like to see ridiculed and banned, and what should be praised and imitated?
I’m from Philadelphia and to us Philadelphians the little town of Pittsburgh, if we think about it at all, is an afterthought, a city somewhere west in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Where the Pittsburgh Pirates used to terrorize the Philadelphia Phillies. And something about steel and glass and Andy Warhol.
Andy Grew Up in Pittsburgh. They named a bridge after him.
But there’s something remarkable happening in Pittsburgh and the entire east-coast venture community would do well to take notice. 3 Rivers Venture Fair is putting Pittsburgh on the map (oh, and so is the G-20 Summit, but that’s no big deal).
I’ve been coaching companies for the 3 Rivers Venture Fair (”3RVF”) since early July, sponsored by my pals at the law firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius. Of all of the venture fairs I’ve coached for, this is the strongest batch of companies I’ve seen. Every one is solid. Big markets, strong teams, many with significant revenue, differentiated technology. Usually when I work with a whole batch of companies at least a couple are clearly duds. Not this batch.
I attended DreamIt Ventures Demo Day last week in Philadelphia. Even though I had contributed some to coaching the company presentations, seeing it all come together in a formal event just blew me away.
DreamIt is one of those new programs, like TechStars and LaunchBox, that are a combination of business incubator + fast-track MBA + summer camp. 10 companies were selected from 300 applicants for the opportunity to spend the summer together at the DreamIt incubator in West Philadelphia, receive mentoring from a long list of experts, and then pitch to the venture community. They got some seed funding too as part of the deal. All the companies were developing a web-based product or service. All the entrepreneurs were either young 20-somethings, or young at heart.
I saw 10 exciting companies who stretched my idea of what is possible to do on the web. I saw the usually staid Philadelphia venture crowd eat it up. I heard about at least one exit from this batch of 10, and buzz about impending funding for some others. A remarkable track record already.
But what really floored me was the presentations. I saw the future. And the future is visually stunning!