Venture Capital Thursday

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I have spent the past few weeks seeking out contacts within the venture capital world. As my thought process goes, I figured that speaking with VC’s was one of the best ways to find opportunities with great start-up companies much earlier in the job lifecycle than waiting until interesting positions are posted on Craigslist, Monster, Yahoo jobs, Linkedin, etc. So far, I have spoken to approximately 10 venture partners, describing the requirements of my dream position: early stage company, great team, compelling consumer value proposition. Thursday, I add two more venture firms to that list to broaden my VC network.

I spoke with Evangelos Simoudis from Trident Capital about opportunities within Tridents portfolio of companies that include DesiHits, Homeaway, Doppleganger, among many others. Our conversation started off like so many other calls have before with me describing my perfect position, giving Evangelos a background of my professional experience, and explaining to Evangelos that even though I am based in Los Angeles, Erica and I have NO problems moving to either SF or Seattle for a great opportunity.

Our conversation took an interesting twist when Evangelos requested that I send along contact information of entrepreneurs with whom I have engaged with, so long as I believed the entrepreneur was building an interesting company that required early stage venture financing. Evangelos went on to explain how, given my vantage point of speaking with start-ups about opportunities that I actually had access to potential deal flow for his fund.

This was an amazing turn of events seeing as how I had always thought I was seeking out help from the venture firms and not the other way around. As it turns out, this process has opened up a world of opportunity, by engaging with many start-up companies to evaluate their business and prospects and working with venture capital firms to identify positions within their portfolio companies. It seems I have become a meeting point and intersection of these worlds: start-up operations and Investment.

My second call was with Brad Hoover from General Catalyst Partners. As mentioned in a previous post, Brad reached out to after having received my email sent earlier this week and immediately seized on this opportunity to learn a bit more about skills, my aspirations and me as a professional. Though Brad and I couldn’t remember where we had originally met, we were both excited about growing our Rolodex and initiating a more involved professional relationship. General Catalysts Partners has an expansive consumer internet portfolio and I am confidant that at some point over the coming weeks and months, will be involved with a consumer oriented company with an opportunity for me to take on a senior role. I told Brad that I would be on the look out for companies that I spoke with that met his venture firms investing criteria and Brad expressed his appreciation.

So, as it turns out, being unemployed and seeking out early stage opportunities is not such a bad place to be. I have created, in only a short period of time, access to both the entrepreneurial side and venture capital side of the start-up world. The venture capitalists have noted the value that this position brings, with access to potential deal flow. However, the entrepreneur community has not yet seen the value of having access to the capital side of the start-up equation. No doubt this will come over time.

June 18th, 2007