1.  What Do Investors Want in a Startup?

Naval Ravikant, speaker

Naval Ravikant, the speaker, has been through the ringer a few times, on both sides of the investment table. I watched one of his ventures, epinions.com, very closely, because my daughter and son in law were employees. So now, a few years later, I follow his Venture Hacks blog.

Most of what he says here is pretty standard. And if you’re interested, his fellow blogger transcribed this interview on venture hacks. Some highlights:

“I look for two things that are paramount above all:

1. Great team. It’s obvious. It’s a tautology. Everybody says it. You have to be working with some of the best people in the industry you’re in.
2. Huge market. Niche markets just don’t work because the first idea never works. You always have to change the idea, so you need room to maneuver in a big market.

“There are three more factors that I look at. Not all three of them are required but I prefer a company to have at least two of them:

1. Difficult technology that is compounding over time.
2. A proprietary distribution channel. A clever viral marketing, or SEO, or partnership, or whatever strategy that gives them a leg up over competitors.
3. A direct monetization model. Something more than throwing up 10 cent banner ad CPMs.

Naval has more authority on this than I do, but his reference to niche markets bothers me a bit. I like niche markets in a world that is constantly splintering and dividing itself finer and finer. Some of the biggest markets there are started as niches: Facebook, for example, focused first on a few university campuses. Yahoo was a niche — the Internet — when it started. Starbucks was once a niche (gourmet coffee, affordable luxury) in the Northwest.

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2. 10 Top Things for Pitching VCs

David Rose, speaker

This is a web-embedded video from an entrepreneur who is also an investor, talking about what investors want to know, and what they want to see in a pitch.

If for whatever reason you don’t see the video here, you can click this link to go to the source video on the TED site.

About a year after his book, The Art of the Start, was published (and after a lot of previous engagements speaking on it), Guy Kawasaki chose this video as the one to post on the web. It’s a very good live and in-person presentation of most of the same content as in the book.

Tim Berry — Three Types of Startups

This is a five-minute video interview with Tim Berry, business-planning expert, talking about the 3 types of startups on the SBTV site.

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Entrepreneurship in Hard Times from Engineering Michigan on Vimeo.

I called it What Biz School Can’t Teach when I reviewed it on my main blog. And below, from BNET, is a video of Guy talking about it.

If, for any reason, you don’t see the video on this page (there are technical reasons, having to do with your system, your bandwidth, add-ons and such), you can probably find the video directly on the source site, using this link.