Blog Roundup: The best I’ve heard… Clean up that hairball before you try to sell it to somebody else!

Excellent post on some of the pitfalls that entrepreneurs run into when raising funds for their startup after their A Round of investment:  Want to Raise Venture Capital More Easily? Clean Up Your Own Shite First

(He’s got a gross photo to kick off his post. Be warned… !)

The thing to remember about the points that Mark Suster raises in this post are that they apply even to many initial valuation negotiations, or post-angel rounds.

If you don’t have a realistic outlook on the value of an early stage company – before a lot of the most difficult execution, monetization, marketing and sales have taken place – and don’t plan for later rounds at reasonable valuations, you may get stuck.

That can happen because of market changes, as this post discusses, or it can happen because you don’t have reasonable expectations to start off.

My advice? Get professional advice before pricing your offering. You and your company will benefit and your fund-raising efforts will be much more likely to succeed with a defensible valuation and reasonable terms, even if you do have to lower the share price.

Wrap-up: Oklahoma Entrepreneur’s Conference 2010

I had the pleasure of speaking at the recent Oklahoma Entrepreneur’s Conference 2010 on a panel about the rules of the road:

Successes to Copy, Failures to Avoid – “Entrepreneur Panel – Moderated and structured panel discussion focused on the best and worst of the entrepreneurial experience and how they met each opportunity.”

I got a chance to talk about some of the best and worst hiring decisions I’ve made in my ventures over the years, as well as how intellectual property risks play into many of the businesses in which I’m involved.

The quick take-away from my answers? Hire slowly and fire fast.

Take serious care about whom you put onto the bus, and if you know someone isn’t performing or is poisoning the barrel, fire fast. It may be a cliche, but it best sums up how to avoid the worst mistakes I’ve made, and that most experienced entrepreneurs will admit having made.

Another entrepreneur mentioned one of my least favorite pitfalls: Client payment risk and defaults on large projects. Ouch. I’ve been through that one.

I also enjoyed talking with several audience members afterwards about their ventures and may have new portfolio companies soon to discuss as a result.

Put on by the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and organized by Shelli Todd, the conference was definitely entertaining this year, with social media educator and author Chris Brogan providing the keynote.

Hopefully the panel videos will become available soon from the Department of Commerce so I can share them with you here…

Review: Hootsuite for Managing Social Media

Hootsuite is an online web application that provides a streamlined, highly customizable interface for managing multiple social media outlets, especially including multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts and pages, as well as Plaxo and LinkedIn accounts.

It is currently free to sign up for an account. Getting started is painless. After you set up connections to a few accounts, Hootsuite’s default interface layout is immediately useful and required little fiddling to meet our needs.

Updates stream automatically through multiple vertical windows laid out across the screen, allowing you to track posts, mentions and direct messages on a single screen. Ongoing conversations are also tracked and can be displayed with a single click.

We use it for all of the above, and especially to monitor for direct messages, mentions and relevant posts.

It also provides scheduling of posts, which we find invaluable when we want to tell absolutely everybody about our company’s latest technical triumph… but it happens to be 1:38 AM in the morning…

The ability to post to multiple streams at once, to quickly respond to messages, and to set up intervals for automatic updating of various streams, all make this a very user-friendly product.

We also really like the detailed statistics available about the number of clicks received on our individual posts, so we can know quickly whether anyone actually cared about our aforementioned early morning triumph, or whether we’d better take our misplaced geeky enthusiasm elsewhere.

There will certainly be changes as Hootsuite figures out how it is going to monetize this very successful product.

Following up on my post about the need, or not, for VCs…

Since my last post [Blog Roundup: Discussion of TechCrunch post on the decline in VC returns] exploring the implications of a potentially smaller capital pool for the foreseeable future for early stage ventures, I’ve run across a couple of relevant posts on Forbes that I thought you might enjoy.

The first one is a bit more serious:

$10 Million Is The New $100 Million – Forbes.com.

The second one isn’t as serious, but is just as interesting a read:

Why Entrepreneurs Don’t Need VCs – Forbes.com

photo credit: Amy Loves Yah

New Blog Name… And a slightly different focus.

After a brief hiatus, we’ve made a name change. If you came here via StartupGeek, then you’ll have noticed that we are now TechVentureGeek.

We’re still going to write about technology startups, but we’re also going to write about mid and later stage technology ventures and how technology and innovation is influencing business practices overall.

We made the change in order to provide readers with a broader business focus and a narrower industry and subject focus.

Check back for more posts soon!