Today was the second day of presenting entrepreneurship and venture investing a l’Americaine to the attendees at the University Technology Entrepreneurial Network event hosted by the university at Aveiro, Portugal. The mandate in Portugal, given the dire economic circumstance, seems to be to emulate the Obama mandate to innovate our way out of this crisis. To do that, the Portuguese are trying to expand their vision beyond the small regional footprint that is Portugal to the larger markets of the rest of the world. This is the purpose of our all-day workshop – to instruct and inspire, to discuss and debate, to deliver suggestions as to how to connect the disparate dots into an entrepreneurial culture that drives innovation, change and economic growth.
Again, the three of us from Carnegie Mellon – Tara Branstad from our Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation who takes the university point of view, Raymond Vennare, CEO of Thermal Therapeutics, a medical device company just through the FDA and ramping up sales and marketing in the US and, in the near future with a CE Mark, Europe, who takes the entrepreneurial point of view, and me taking the investor perspective – triangulate the presentation Rashomon-like by offering three different views of each core topic.
The subject of today was venture investing and valuation. We start the session by showing a real pitch by an American entrepreneur. As investor, I present the Magic 10, the list of key things that I look for in a pitch. Raymond Vennare gives his Series A pitch (although in reality he is past this phase). As facilitator, I ask them to ask the hard questions, to think like an American investor.
From there we launch into the lexicon of entrepreneurship and venture investing, from which we conduct a mock term-sheet negotiation exercise, where certain groups are venture investors (who have to decide what type, what stage, what domain, etc.), and other groups represent early stage ventures.
We wind up the day with a discussion of the differences and similarities of policies, attitudes and activities around innovation and entrepreneurship in the US and Portugal. Certainly entrepreneurship is different in the US which has a strong history of entrepreneurship and venture capital. Portugal is in its infancy in terms of entrepreneurship and new venture financing. However, we see several trends in Portugal that are of note regarding entrepreneurship and startups. One is that many resources are being devoted to stimulating innovation and entrepreneurship in Portugal, particularly within the university and incubator communities. As a result, the country is teeming with entrepreneurial verve – we see many impressive innovations that have clear commercial potential on an international scale. But Portugal needs to recognize what they have and they need to tell the world. In general, we find that the entrepreneurs are thinking too small. It’s equivalent to a Pennsylvania-based entrepreneur planning to market his/her products and services only in PA!
But Portugal, which invented navigation and once ruled the seas, has put resources into education. The quality of the technologies that we see, the minds of the professors and students that we meet, the fact that they celebrate science and technology from grade school on up (we witnessed the end-of-the-academic-year celebration on a university campus of a middle and high school program that accelerates math and science education) is impressive. If the Portuguese can continue this trend, producing novel technologies and if they can foster the entrepreneurial spirit, knowledge and experience to bring these innovations to market, I believe that we will see much influence on both sides of the Atlantic from this small nation.
