Boston Entrepreneurs Network

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Raising Money from VC's

Presentations

Meeting Overview

At face value from the media and public equity markets there appears to be an improvement in the economy. For emerging growth companies, the start-ups, the big question to ask is: “Are deals getting done?”

Venture capital is a leading source of growth capital for emerging companies. In normal times the challenges and risks to growing a company are daunting and the competition for the VC investment fierce. But when start-up growth capital lessens how does the entrepreneur position themselves to win this scarce capital?

On April 5th our panel of venture capital providers and entrepreneurs will guide the audience in the process of raising money, especially in tough times, to understand what is important to investors now and in the next stages of company growth. They will talk about investments that are being made today and why, highlight what are the key considerations venture capital investors focus on that compels them to do the deal. They will talk about positioning your company to be attractive to the investor and identify critical milestones to gain a preferred entrée to the capital market providers. They will offer perspectives on investment trends emerging and opinions on what the early stage investment markets may look like in the coming year.

Panel:

Robert J. Chicoski - General Partner, Saturn Partners

Bob is a General Partner at Saturn Partners (www.saturnasset.com), a Boston-based venture capital firm that invests in early stage companies located primarily in the eastern U.S. Saturn focuses on the information and financial technology, advanced materials, and specialty energy sectors. The firm also invests selectively elsewhere, including certain areas of life sciences and consumer services. Bob is responsible for sourcing and evaluating investment opportunities, as well as working with portfolio companies to drive growth, performance improvement, and harvest alternatives. Bob currently serves on the board of Paneve, a company that has developed a general purpose processor for high performance video applications (www.paneve.com). Prior to joining Saturn, Bob worked for a family office on a number of private equity projects and was the Chief Operating Officer of i2i. Earlier in his career, he worked for Deloitte Consulting and the Federal Reserve Bank. Bob holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics from Georgetown University.

Kyle Fugere - Business Development Associate, Tollman Capital Partners

As an entrepreneur and business associate, the knowledge Kyle has gained has been directly related to his experience of business ownership and most recently leading capital investments within the software and beverage industries.

Before joining Tollman Capital, Kyle began his journey of business development and entrepreneurship in an unusual way, while working in Zambia, Africa, where he built a successful business development project for UNICEF. Shortly after, Kyle founded and became President of P2E, LLC, an information technology firm that specializes in document management and scanning services for the medical and legal industries.

In 2010, Kyle joined the start-up venture capital firm, Tollman Capital Partners, as a Business Development Associate. Tollman Capital Partners is a Massachusetts based venture capital firm whose primary goal is investing in early-phase start-up companies in search of capitalization in the $25K to $100K range.

Anupendra Sharma - Investment Partner Venture Capital
Siemens Financial Services Inc., Siemens Venture Capital
http://finance.siemens.com/financialservices/venturecapital/

Anupendra Sharma is Partner at Siemens Venture Capital investing in healthcare (devices, diagnostics, software and services). Anupendra is an investor in China Diagnostics and Cylex. He is a former investor in Sequenom (NASD: SQNM) and BioImagene (acquired by Roche).

Prior to SVC, Anupendra was an investment banker and M&A professional for eight years at JPMorgan, Citigroup and Siemens, after he graduated from Cornell's MBA program. Prior to business school, Anupendra worked at Ford in the UK, and was a member of the team that set up Ford in both India and China. Anupendra co-founded Mobile Medics, named the Most Innovative Social Venture of 2006 by the Global Social Venture Competition for attempting to solve the last-mile problem for global rural healthcare. Anupendra also started a shrimp farm in Belize, Central America while at business school.

He most recently founded the Startup Leadership Program in 2006 to groom the next generation of startup CEOs. This is a fast-growing network of 215 founder CEOs and Innovators in the US and Asia that go through a 6-month program to educate them in all aspects of fundraising.

Anupendra holds an MBA from Cornell University, MS in Accounting & Finance from Manchester Business School, Masters in Economics and Bachelors in Instrumentation Engineering from BITS Pilani, India.

Moderator:

Lawrence C. Grumer � Managing Director � TAA Corp., iVEST, LLC
(http://www.taacorp.com/, http://ivest.us)

Larry is an expert in the commercialization of technology. He has partnered to launch ten companies, across wireless internet, web 3.0, mobile power sources, propulsion systems, software defined test and measurement, corporate marketing, and a 30-person engineering consultancy. He is a Phase 2 proposal Grant Reviewer for the National Science Foundation.

TAA is the management advisory and investment firm Larry formed in 1994 that commercializes and capitalizes technology for early-stage technology ventures and corporate spin-outs. He is Managing Partner of iVEST Partners LLC providing corporate development, finance advisory and investment banking affiliation. Larry is Chairman of the EntreTech Forum and Chairman Emeritus of the Boston Entrepreneur�s Network and. He has held management positions at Arthur D. Little, Textron and Foster-Miller, led a US-CDN joint venture and managed business restarts, turnarounds and restructures. Larry received a BSME and an MBA from Northeastern University. He has held a Top Secret clearance.

Boston ENET meetings are free for our members and $20 for non-members.

5:15 PM Pre-meeting Dinner
Bertucci's Restaurant
475 Winter St., (exit 27B off Route 128), Waltham, MA ("pay-as-you-go")

7:00 - 10:00PM Meeting Presentation
Note: Meeting at Emerging Enterprise at Foley Hoag, 1000 Winter Street, Suite 4000, Waltham, MA

Online regisration for this event is closed, however, registration and payment will be accepted at the door!