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Angel investor Ron Conway has put money in over 500 companies, so he knows a few things about what works and what doesn’t. In this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture at Stanford University, Conway and fellow investor Mike Maples Jr. of Maples Investments discuss ways to stay competitive and make your money last. Tip one: Don’t be in a hurry to grow your staff as fast as you might be tempted.

Tags: lean and mean, Stanford University

A good business plan is like the trailer for a movie; it should be eye-catching enough to make an investor want to see more. After wading through too many long-winded business plans, Dutch investment firm Lunatech Ventures has built a web tool called Plan Cruncher that creates a one-page, visual summary of your plan.

Plan Cruncher asks questions about key issues such as the team, product and revenue plan and uses icons to represent concepts such as “advertising-based revenue model” or “we have a working demo”. While the user selects from standard options, there are also free-text sections that allow some creativity. Plan Cruncher may not replace the traditional business plan, but it could act as a useful first filter for investors. The tool is free to use, and the icon set used in Plan Cruncher is released under a creative commons license so it can be modified and reused in other applications and publications. Essentially this means that you can create your own business plan format using the icons. Here’s an example of Plan Cruncher’s output:

According to Lunatech’s MD Micheal Pentowski, the objective of Plan Cruncher is to get enough salient information on a page to capture an investor’s attention and get a meeting. The company has seen a huge jump in business plan submissions since it launched the tool a week ago, so the format itself seems to have captured the imagination of entrepreneurs. Lunatech is investigating applying the same idea to job resumes by using a set of icons at the start of a resume to summarize the key points.

Tags: business plan, Investment

Companies: lunatech ventures

A good business plan is like the trailer for a movie; it should be eye-catching enough to make an investor want to see more. After wading through too many long-winded business plans, Dutch investment firm Lunatech Ventures has built a web tool called Plan Cruncher that creates a one-page, visual summary of your plan.

Plan Cruncher asks questions about key issues such as the team, product and revenue plan and uses icons to represent concepts such as “advertising-based revenue model” or “we have a working demo”. While the user selects from standard options, there are also free-text sections that allow some creativity. Plan Cruncher may not replace the traditional business plan, but it could act as a useful first filter for investors. The tool is free to use, and the icon set used in Plancruncher is released under a creative commons license so it can be modified and reused in other applications and publications. Essentially this means that you can create your own business plan format using the icons. Here’s an example of Plan Cruncher’s output:

According to Lunatech’s MD Micheal Pentowski, the objective of Plan Cruncher is to get enough salient information on a page to capture an investor’s attention and get a meeting. The company has seen a huge jump in business plan submissions since it launched the tool a week ago, so the format itself seems to have captured the imagination of entrepreneurs. Lunatech is investigating applying the same idea to job resumes by using a set of icons at the start of a resume to summarize the key points.

Tags: business plan, Investment

Companies: lunatech ventures

(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Scott Olson is president of MindLink Marketing. He contributed this column to VentureBeat.)

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a colleague about the challenges he was having with his company’s leads pipeline. He had the contacts, but the opportunities weren’t growing fast enough.

I’ve actually seen this many times. The assumption is that once an initial outreach has been done to new contacts, the conversion has to happen fast. If it doesn’t, they’re considered a dead lead and the general thinking is that spending too much time on them is wasted effort. This can also apply to leads that convert to opportunities but get stuck in an early stage in the pipeline.

While a strong contact database can be a real asset to the company, tapping into its value depends upon having a good strategy for lead nurturing. The best way to do that is to think like an editor, not a marketer.

The key to success isn’t abandoning these highly valuable contacts, but rather spending time organizing them and building a relationship based on relevant, interesting content.

Think of your job as the publisher of a niche magazine of news, commentary and insights into your company’s technology domain and prospects industry. This allows you to connect to your audience and become their trusted source of information and solutions to address their problems.

Here are some good strategies for publishing your niche magazine and implementing a successful lead nurturing program.

•    Understand and group your audience – Don’t treat your audience all the same. Identify the most common characteristics among the companies in your leads database and group them accordingly. These groupings can be by industry, size of company, key problem they are solving and many other characteristics.

•    Identify an editorial content strategy - Don’t just send e-mail blasts with marketing promotional offers. Report and comment on relevant industry news and events. Understand what industry news is interesting to your audience. Some news merits an immediate, personal campaign vs. waiting to include it in a newsletter.

•    Blog to your content strategy - Blog about relevant news and topics that map to your content strategy. Most companies should be posting a minimum of 1-2 times per week (and, as you grow, even more). The trap companies often fall into with blogging is that they think every post has to be a deep thought leadership piece. If you have this attitude, your blog will die on the vine. Creating this content regularly with variety is too difficult. Blog about anything and everything that may be interesting to your audience. Blog about a new government regulation. Blog about the tradeshow you are attending. Blog about a customer problem that you discussed in a sales call (no names have to be mentioned). All of these things are interesting to your audience and they can learn from them.

•    Promote your content with social media - Use social media to connect in a variety of ways to your prospect list. Use Twitter to promote new blog postings and publish your corporate twitter accounts on your site, in your email and business cards. Create and use LinkedIn groups and have your employees update their status to reflect interesting posts. Whatever social media you are investing in should promote your content.

•    Your newsletter is your magazine – Highlight your top tracking blogs from the month and send a custom newsletter to each contact group. Make sure the content is relevant to them and coordinate any calls to action in the email appropriately. If you have blogged regularly, then your newsletter content is already written – meaning the hardest part of the job is already done.

•    Use marketing automation tools for distribution, lead scoring and follow up – Using marketing automation tools is an absolute must to get the most out of your lead nurturing programs. There are a number of tools that meet a wide variety of budgets and have a range of features. The key is that whether you use Eloqua, Loopfuse or another tool, you need to have the capability to easily manage your contact lists, publish regular targeted content to those contacts, and score and follow up with them appropriately based on their subsequent actions.

Too many companies have valid contact lists that go untapped. Today’s sales process takes time and relationship building. Thinking like an editor and delivering interesting, relevant content to your audience will establish a connection with them, create thought leadership and keep you at the top of mind when it comes to solving the problems you address and they are ready to buy.

Tags: sales generation

(Editor’s note: Will Herman is an entrepreneur who has founded or held senior roles in several tech companies. This story originally appeared on his blog.)

Don’t even get me started about the sorry state of American technological and economic competitiveness and our complete ignorance of what really made the US a great and growing country since it’s inception. We are so caught up with balancing what is politically correct, what is politically achievable and not disrupting paths to reelection that we have forgotten what it’s like to have dreams and to work towards a significantly better or, at least different, future.

Because we, as a nation, are so stuck dealing with the present, we have found ourselves mired in a tar pit of legislative nonsense that is slowly killing our chances to be competitive with the rapidly expanding world around us. And yes, being economically competitive is, in fact, necessary if we want to maintain our current societal dreams and values.

Because of the work of a variety of smart and dedicated people, including Paul Graham and my good friend, Brad Feld, one small, but critical cog in the complex machine of government regulation has been given a chance to turn. Late last month, Senators John Kerry (D) and Richard Luger (R), the two ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed legislation to create a Startup Visa.

Simply put, anyone from anywhere who starts a company in the U.S. and is able to reasonably capitalize it can get a visa to stay in this country to develop their business here, on American soil with American employees, paying American taxes.

That’s a no-brainer you say? You might be surprised to learn that the country is routinely kicking entrepreneurs out, telling them to start their businesses elsewhere.

These aren’t people who are taking away American jobs. They’re entrepreneurs – people who are creating new technologies, services, products and . . . wait for it . . . jobs. It’s a meritocracy, folks, the best stuff wins. Anyone is allowed to play. That is, for now, if you live here.

The new legislation is supported with over 100 signatures from leading venture capitalists and angel investors throughout the country.  I’m honored that my name is included on the list. Not because I’m an investor looking for more deals, but I’m an American with an insanely strong desire to see this country continue to set the pace for the rest of the world when it comes to opportunity and leadership.

Relatively speaking, the streets of the US are, in fact, paved with gold. I’d like to see us keep it that way and to provide opportunities for even more Americans to be able to mine it.

The text of the proposed act is embedded below, if you’d like to give it a thorough read.

Startup Visa Act Final Final 1

Image by murphydean via Flickr.

Tags: immigration, startup visa

(Editor’s note: Rick Rodgers is an author, keynote speaker, wealth manager and president of Rodgers & Associates. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.)

Many entrepreneurs believe they don’t need to plan for retirement. Sadly, they’re quite mistaken.

Too many start-up owners actually view their business as their retirement plan. And while creating a valuable company that could eventually be sold or go public may indeed provide a comfortable retirement, it’s no way to plan. It’s the equivalent of asking a financial advisor to put all of your savings into a single stock. Sure, if you hit a home run you’re set, but no prudent planner would ever recommend such a strategy.

Only 35 percent of small business owners had some sort of retirement plan in 2007, according to Harris Interactive’s ShareBuilder Small Business Annual Retirement Trend survey. In 2008, that number dropped to 26 percent.

It doesn’t take a 401(k) plan to start retirement saving. A Roth IRA is an excellent tool for early start-up owners, who generally aren’t seeing notable paychecks. While it offers no tax advantages as you fund it, you’ll see significant benefits when the time comes to withdraw the money. (Withdrawals are tax-free if the account is at least five years old and you are age 59 ½ or older.)

Once your business starts to grow and income taxes become more of a concern, you might consider switching your contributions to a Traditional IRA, where contributions are deductible.

Currently you can invest (and deduct) up to $5,000 per year. If you want to deduct more than $5,000, switch to a SEP (Simplified Employee Pension) IRA, which allows you to contribute up to 25 percent of your net self-employed income.

(Note that you’ll also have to cover eligible employees in a SEP IRA, so be sure to check with your accountant or financial planner before setting up this type of account.)

Unlike Roths, Traditional IRAs and SEP IRAs give you tax benefits up front, when you make the contributions.  Distributions from these accounts will be taxable when you take the money out.

While feeding the start-up monster is hard to resist – especially when funding is tight – it’s critical to diversify your funds into investments other than your business. And there’s no time like the present to start.  Time is your biggest ally in retirement planning. As Einstein said: “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest”.

Also, just as you perform a quarterly review of your company’s finances, take time to review your own retirement position every few months, with the objective of raising it.

If your start-up ultimately attracts a buyer or, better still, goes public, you’re certainly no worse off. But if your company becomes one of the sad (statistically likely) failures, you’ve started the process of ensuring a semi-soft landing in your later years.

Photo by scottwills via Flickr

Tags: retirement, retirement savings

DEMO Spring 2010 is the premier launchpad event for innovative technology, and will take place March 21-23 at the JW Marriott in Palm Desert. As the event grows closer, we’ll unveil information about the key themes and panelists featured in each of the seven DEMO Tech Segments.

Each vertical launch segment will feature product demonstrations, pitches by early-stage entrepreneurs, as well as a panel discussion addressing specific funding challenges and investment opportunities. Matt Marshall, Editor in Chief of VentureBeat and Executive Producer of DEMO will lead the panel discussions with key members of the DEMO ecosystem including past demonstrators, VC’s, service providers and corporate business development/acquisitions professionals.

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Cloud Technology:

Cloud computing is radically changing business by supporting anytime, anywhere data access, and the cloud technologies segment will showcase the latest hot startups and products about to disrupt the market.

Panelists:

• Peter Fenton, general partner, Benchmark Capital
• Mike Maples, managing partner, Maples Investments
• Satish Dharmaraj, partner, Redpoint Ventures

For a look at the DEMO Spring 2010 Conference agenda, click here.

“Register for DEMO, March 21-23, JW Marriott in Palm Desert, CA from the VentureBeat site and save $1000 on your 2-day conference registration fee (includes all demonstrator launch presentations, access to the DEMO pavilion, meals and social functions).

(Editor’s note: “Ask the Attorney” is a weekly VentureBeat feature allowing start-up owners to get answers to their legal questions. Submit yours in the comments below and look for answers in the coming weeks. Author Scott Edward Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker Corporate Law Group, PLLC, a boutique corporate law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs.)

Question:  My two friends and I have been working on a new venture for almost a year.  Our site is in beta and we actually have a few customers (it’s a subscription-based model).  We’ve spoken to a lawyer about incorporating, but we don’t know how to split-up the stock.  Should everyone just get one-third?

Answer: Not necessarily… The splitting of equity is a significant business decision, which must be negotiated among the founders based upon their respective contributions to date and their expectations going forward.  Simply dividing the shares equally among the three of you may sound fair on its face, but it’s usually not the correct decision.

Factors you need to consider include:

• Whether any of the founders contributed cash and/or intellectual property to the venture – which would warrant a higher percentage for that founder.
• Whether any of the founders will be working part-time or less than the other founders going forward – which would warrant a lower percentage for that founder.
• Whether any of the founders put in more time prior to the incorporation (or actually started the venture) – which would warrant a higher percentage for that founder.
• Whether any of the founders will have greater responsibility or will be adding more value going forward than the other founders – which would warrant a higher percentage for that founder.

The bottom line is that every venture is different, with varied contributions (past and future) by the founders.  It might help to sit down with your co-founders and your lawyer and hash this issue out.  As I have previously discussed, you will also need to hash out the vesting schedules, including whether any founders will vest a portion of their stock “up front” and/or whether a  one-year “cliff” will be imposed on any founders.

Something else to keep in mind: When launching a venture, the first rule of thumb is to incorporate as soon as possible (when the venture has as little value as possible).  Among other things, this allows you to be able to issue stock to the founders for a nominal purchase price, meaning they can share in the increased value of the company (and quickly begin the capital gains holding period).

To the extent the venture’s incorporation is delayed and its value increases (due to the meeting of certain milestones, etc.), there may be tricky tax issues with respect to the purchase price or value of the shares issued to the founders.  If the company were ever audited, the IRS may take the position that the shares sold for a nominal purchase price actually had value. That would make those shares a form of compensation to the founders (particularly if the shares were issued on a date close to a financing date) and there would be taxes due on them.

As I have previously discussed, another good reason to do this is to protect against personal liability. Good luck!

Disclaimer: This “Ask the Attorney” post discusses general legal issues, but it does not constitute legal advice in any respect.  No reader should act or refrain from acting on the basis of any information presented herein without seeking the advice of counsel in the relevant jurisdiction.  VentureBeat, the author and the author’s firm expressly disclaim all liability in respect of any actions taken or not taken based on any contents of this post.

Tags: ask the attorney, legal quesions

There’s no minimum age to launch a start-up, but young entrepreneurs sometimes face challenges that experienced ones do not. Stanford University gathered a panel of successful start-up owners in their 20s to address the age gap and gather their advice for younger people who are thinking about striking out on their own.

In this hour-long audio podcast, you’ll hear from Hearsay Labs Steve Garrity and Clara Shih, Increo Solutions’ Kimber Lockhart and Jeff Seibert, unwrap’s Josh Reeves and Apture’s Tristan Harris.

Tags: young entrepreneurs

(Editor’s note: Alain Ranaud is the founder of FairSoftware. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

With all that’s going on with Apple and HTC, it may not be a popular opinion these days, but I think software patents are legitimate.

They’re just a little flawed.

The problem, you see, is their length. Seventeen years of monopoly is an eternity in Internet time. Instead, software patents should only be valid for seven years.

This would be the least disruptive change to the system, allowing companies to protect their intellectual property without overly burdening the general public with bogus patents.

Patent trolls would generally disappear, because a loophole in the current patent system allows them to wait for a technology to spread before retro-actively patenting it. If software patents were good for just seven years, these parasites would either have to claim a more recent priority date and face a lot of prior art, or keep their early filing date and be left with obsolete patents.

For instance, the patent on wireless messaging technology used to sue Apple and others was filed in 2005 -  well after the invention it describes became common knowledge. However, through the continuation-in-part loophole, it pretends to have the same protection from the law as if it had been invented 10 years prior. By filing late, patent trolls can make sure that their patents cover the hot technology of the day, and later claim that they invented it. And it’s legal.

So why not get rid of software patents completely?

I don’t buy the argument that just because it’s software, it can’t be inventive. A position that aims to eliminate all patents might be more consistent, but I’d point to China, where piracy runs rampant, as an indicator of what would happen. Too many entrepreneurs have seen their design copied by their Chinese manufacturing partners.

While I’d like to reduce the duration of patents for software, I recognize there are some areas that the 15-year limit makes sense. The research investment that goes into making a software patent is small compared to, say, something in the biotech field. It makes sense for drug manufacturers have a monopoly for 15 years, for instance, since that’s how slowly that industry moves.

A more flexible patent system – one that has a range on patent lengths depending on industry – would be a huge improvement and is the most pragmatic approach to solving the patent crisis.

I like the notion that someone can get points for being extra smart once in their life. I don’t, however, like how easy it is to manipulate the current system. You can’t patent something that is obvious to someone who knows the topic well.

Patents are meant for amazing new technologies, for that brilliant idea that elegantly solves a problem people have been having for years (yet no one had solved in that manner previously). That deserves something.

Like a patent.

Tags: patents