What do you want from me??
Monday, July 18, 2005 at 08:01AM by Charlie O'Donnell I get pinged with conference advertisements left and right. By far, the most useful conference I've ever been to was the IPLA conference, where I got to network and exchange best practices with other LPs.
GPs, however, play it a little closer to the vest. They share deals with each other, but they don't exactly open the kimono the way an LP would, because competition for entrepreneurs is more prevelent than competition to get into funds. Even when its a top tier venture fund, LPs don't really think of it as competiting against another LP. I could tell you Mayfield is raising capital right now, but it doesn't really help you, because if you haven't already been talking to them, you'll probably get shut out. Even so, a firm like that pretty much gets their pick anyway, regardless of how much you go knocking at the door.
That being said, I still have the urge to go to a conference, but so few of them look interesting to me. I'd love to see more entrepreneurs, but a lot of these things are such VC pile-ons. So what do I want? I want to be enlightened, by my peers and by entreprenuers. I'm there to learn and to meet people. I don't want to be sold to and I don't want to sell myself.
But this is a bigger issue--the issue of what professional services or just your own peers can do for you in general. At Union Square Ventures, we want to figure out what we can offer entreprenuers that will help us attract the best ones and differentiate ourselves. We also want to figure out what other kinds of firms are providing things that entreprenuers need, so we can network with those people to find the deals that match our thesis.
So, what do you want? What are your needs? As an entreprenuer, as a VC, as a technologist? Are they being met? How can a firm like ours be valuable? How can I be valuable as a blogger, or am I just here for your own personal amusement?
What am I? Some kind of clown? Here to make you laugh?
Tell me how I can help you, or how Union Square Ventures can help you. I'm curious what you people are out there looking for. Be as general or as specific as you'd like.
Reader Comments (3)
I'm both a conference organizer (MeshForum - http://www.meshforum.org), an entrepreneur (JigZaw - http://www.jigzaw.com) and a service provider to investors, entrepreneurs, and enterprises (consulting services through JigZaw).
So wearing all three hats some answers to your questions.
My view of the "best" conferences - no matter which hat I'm wearing - are the ones that bring together people from a wide range of perspectives, around some shared interests, and give everyone attending a lot of opportunities to talk with and hear from the other people in the room.
I agree that I don't want to be "sold to" at great conferences, nor to do I want to "sell" myself (except to the extent that by participating and contributing I give a demonstration of my value as a consultant and advisor).
A great way Union Square Ventures could help reach out to entrepreneurs and get a good set of many of the most innovative ones would be to support some of the many small in attendance but large in reach conferences which now occur. I'm thinking of conference such as:
- Poptech- Gnomedex- various "bloggercons"- MeshForum (see above, I'm biased here)- Supernova
One thing all of the above have in common is that besides being great conferences to attend, they are also being distributed online via IT Conversations (http://www.itconversations.com).
Doug Kaye has recently announced that IT Conversations will be run as a non-profit.
If you as Union Square Ventures would like to reach many of the most innovative entrepreneurs around, withouth "selling" and while simultanously supporting a great and highly valuable service, all at a very low cost, I would suggest that you contact Doug Kaye and offer to sponsor IT Conversations.
Your support there (and I might suggest you talk with some other VC firms whom you frequently co-invest with and see if they will also join you) would be much appreciated by all the conferences and the many people working to make the content available online.
(to give a bit of perspective, a small conference such as MeshForum costs just 10's of thousands of dollars to put on - a few thousand goes a very long way. IT Conversations extends the reach of a conference like MeshForum from <50, or in other cases < 500 people, to well over 10,000 listeners PER session)
At conferences which Union Square Ventures attends - I would suggest that you approach the conference organizers and ask "what are your plans around meals" - at many conferences that try to cut costs meals are "on your own". Union Square could invest a few k (in many cases) and buy the conference attendees lunch, drinks, or dinner - and what you get besides a bit of publicity is a forum at the confernece where people can talk with each other and network. I would suggest that you also propose to the conference organizers that someone speak at that meal - and that the speaker engage with the audience in a semi-formal manner to get them talking and networking.
At a conference that was otherwise full of speakers selling their firms/services, the lunch was at tables grouped by common interests with a set of questions to discuss over lunch and presentations by each table to group afterwords. From one such lunch I directly got a three-week consulting engagement.
Hope this helps, I'm happy to discuss it further with you in public or in private.
Shannon
Well, this isn't what you're looking for, but if you could find an entrepreneur who figured out some technology for creating athletic footwear that could be adjusted for each individual (and each foot), I'd pay an almost unlimited amount for the product. Seriously, if someone could come up with a pair of running shoes that didn't make my toenails turn black, or give me knee or ankle problems, that would allow me to significantly up my weekly mileage, or even better yet, a pair of hiking shoes or boots that would give me a ghost of a chance of making it up the entire Appalachian Trail, I'd pay $2000 without blinking. More if they were going to last for the whole couple thousand miles. Also, ski boots for women that really fit properly. I think there must be some sort of technology that could be used to measure the amount of pronation, where the calf attaches etc. in each foot that would allow shoes to be appropriately customized without resorting to a podiatrist and orthotics, which are not comfortable in running shoes because they're too inflexible (and they're expensive, and it's hard to convince a podiatrist to make them for two pairs of running shoes, a pair of hiking boots, and a pair of ski boots, and they're not as easy to move from shoe to shoe as you would think).