We’re still on the hunt for one more additional funding source, so you folks haven’t missed much over the past month.  Although, I must say the team has definitely learned a lot about term sheets, investment negotiations and company structure strategy.  One great book that has been making its cycle through the team is “The Entreprenuer’s Guide to Business Law”.

It’s a great read and, for an engineer like myself (aka not top notch in the reading comprehension category), it has the right amount of repetition to ingrain all the important information into your head.  From corporation types to term sheet components, everything is explained in explicit detail.  Between this book and a couple other documents, we were able to interpret term sheets presented to us and formulate our own.  (definitely take a look at MIT’s Entrepreneurship documents, http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/15975/resources/angelreportexcerpts.pdf).

So with that said, I’m going to hop back into investment research so that we can keep the initiative moving forward.  I promise we’ll be checking in more often as we have devised some alternate business initiatives that will support our overall goal and expand the profitability potential for our upcoming online video site. We will share more on this soon. Happy Monday!

While the team has been working hard, doing what they do, I have been idle the past couple days, just pondering next steps.  It’s amazing how anxious you get sitting around not being physically productive after you’ve become accustomed to working day in and day out.    The break is short lived though. Today, its time to take some matter into my own hands.  I’ve been waiting for investors to introduce us to their colleagues (aka additional investors) and we haven’t received additional feedback from our pitch at Burrell (which we did a couple weeks ago).  Too much delay I tell you.  Time to keep moving.  We’re going to pitch more agencies and find more investors while we await word from our previous meetings.

In regards to investors, I’m determined to get back in touch with Blumberg Capital, as I think we are a perfect match for their fund, and in addition I think its time to find more regionally focused funds that are 100% aligned with our mission to revitalize the economy of Detroit.  I found a great website, Michigan Venture Capital Association.  It somewhat consolidates the investment community in MI all in one place. They single out angel, VC, corporate cap and entrepreneurial services. So we’ll see what we come up with using this great resource.

As far as marketing agencies go?  They’re a dime a dozen, and the majority of them need help in properly executing online video strategy.  It’s really a matter of which agencies have the ideal clients.  It’s kind of hard to top the opportunity Burrell presents, in that they work with McDonalds, Toyota and Tide, amongst other major brands.  We are really going to have to aim at major agencies to stay within those ranks.  Looks like I’ll be taking a shot at companies like BBDO, or perhaps we go straight to brands.  Regardless, the opportunities are endless.

Well writing this entry was good ground work for this weeks work.  I’ll report back on our results in a few days.

After our meeting at Burrell last Thursday we setup a conference call with an old colleague from college.  He had been asking us about the business and has been interested in investing, but we weren’t quite ready to bring private equity into the picture until recently.  I believe that you always want to have all your ducks in a row before starting to consume money from private parties.  Motown’s ducks are lined up and walking single file, so we finally made the call.

One tip for those who plan to do investor business over the phone, make sure you have a good phone in hand.  I love my phone, but had it not been for the fact that my partner and I were conference calling right across from each other, we may have lost the call.  After the call began, things were going great but my phone battery died in the middle of a sentence.  This happened to take place while I was explaining the basis of the Motown Initiative.  I quickly reached across for my partner’s phone and politically informed the party on the other end that my partner had to step out for a moment.  After about 3 minutes of talking, the potential investor simply said “you know, my decision was made before we spoke today, but I wanted to hear more about the project from you guys, you have confirmed my intuition, how can I transfer money”.   My mouth kinda dropped, I can’t lie.  I always heard that investors making their decisions off the bat, but I had never experienced it first hand.  All the work on the pitch deck and executive summary had paid off.  Someone gets it!

Yes folks, we have our first private investor and from the sounds of it, there may be a couple more on the way.  This was just the confidence booster I needed to get back on my feet to find more private funding while we await final decision from large VCs.

At a recent event in San Diego, I was wandering through a mixer in search of food (and a drink ) when I bumped into my good buddy Miles from Tremor Media.  He had been our main contact there for some months now but just recently he switched to a new company, Double Verify.   We still have a good relationship with Tremor regardless of his prescense, but Miles wasnt there to talk about the past, he was thinking about our future.  He kindly introduced Double Verify’s key investor,  Dave Blumberg.

Not sure what an investor was doing in Coronodo Bay with a bunch of marketing managers at a brand summit, but then again, what was I doing there haha.  Ah, I remember, a free stay in a five star hotel with great food, not to mention the opportunity to learn and teach in an environment of my peers.   In any case, we got to talking and it turned out that Dave is in the market to invest in digital media.  What a coincidence, I have a digital media start up.  This was an exciting conversation as it was the first time I actually got to use my elevator pitch in a real life conversation.  All the practice had paid off.

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Over the past couple weeks the team has been all over the place, but our main focus has been developing a pitch for Burrell, an ad agency in Chicago.  Burrell handles major clients, including, Toyota, McDonalds and Verizon, focusing predominantly on minority markets.  If you’ve seen a McD’s commercial with Beyonce singing or a Tide commercial that looks like it has some of the cast from Soul Food in it, that’s their work.  They also have some great general market efforts for Verizon and Bounty.  In anycase, we have been offered an opportunity to present our online video findings as well as production capabilities.  This is not only a good chance for us to start developing revenue through our production office, but it also will allow us to get feedback on our upcoming website with regards ad placement.

Over the next couple days we’ll be finishing up our powerpoint and integrating some cool reels that should, as they say, “knock their socks off”, for lack of a better phrase.  I’ll post those up sometime in the near future for you guys to see.  We also came up with some example ad delivery formats involving their brands (An example of a Tide in-video interactive module can be seen to the right).  We want to show them the advantages of online marketing and how it can be used to better serve their clients needs.   So i’ll let you guys know how it goes, wish us luck.

Forgive the hiatus folks but it’s been an intense couple of weeks.  We’ve been working diligently on our formal business plan and we finally firmed up a final draft late last week.  I’m sure along the way there will be revisions and additions, but the document is in a form which I’m comfortable presenting to additional investors.  As mentioned previously, we are currently in talks with Ann Arbor Spark, however they let us know that access to their seed fund requires an outside investment match (the source doesn’t matter).  Of course, from my perspective, I think it would be odd to ask another investor to help me match unconfirmed funds.  Thus at this point, Spark funds would appear to be a “bonus” of sorts, unless we some how came up with the funds match on our own terms.

Despite the fact we don’t have money to start formal development on our broadband video project, we do still have a unique set of skills and an unrivaled expertise in online video.  We plan to use this to our advantage to generate start-up cash.   In a few weeks we’ll be going to pitch online video ad consultation and production services to a couple of major ad agencies in Chicago.  This work is a little left field in relation to our overall goals, but without the proper start-up funds there will be no way of achieving them anyways.  I think this work will show our ability to make the most of any situation.  It’s important for our investors to know that no matter what comes of the product we develop, we’re going to turn a profit and succeed at our social mission.  This approach to funding will also guarantee that we retain majority share of our company, which is never a bad thing.

So in the meantime, we’ll be creating a pitch for our prospect clients and diving into some faux creative for a couple of their key brands.  Hopefully I’ll be able to post some of the stuff we come up with in the upcoming weeks.  Happy Labor Day folks.  (back to my weekend off)

The light is coming for Detorit

Everyday I try to read at least one article, blog entry or book chapter related to business.  My desk is simply stacked with reading material spanning everything from Inc. Magazine to MBA for Dummies.  Yesterday, I noticed there was an article about “the 10 best cities to start a business in” on the cover of Entrepreneur.  I opened the book only to be disappointed.  I thought to myself, why have they not cited Detroit?

As I began to read the article, I realized that they weren’t focusing on cities that were ripe for change and advancement; they were more so highlighting cities they thought embodied the entrepreneurial spirit.  Unfortunately, Detroit doesn’t quite do that yet.  I figure they could have at least mentioned Ann Arbor, there have been a number of start-ups there, but much to my dismay no mention of any city in Michigan.   Continuing to read, I started to notice statements like “their unemployment is near 10%” and “the cost of living is more affordable than it has been in eight years”.  Do people not realize the unemployment rate in Detroit is about 15% (50% more) and the cost of living is borderline cheapest in the nation haha.  It really isn’t a laughing matter, but I still feel like people are not realizing the potential of Detroit.

I would call Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix or Austin interesting places but not necessarily anything special for entrepreneurs (four of the cities they cited).   Vegas is a great place to party;  San Diego is a nice place to sit on the beach and they have a nice Zoo; Phoenix is super hot if you need a tan; Austin is a great place to meet women I hear;  But I really don’t think any of these places can beat the opportunity inherent in Detroit.  The local talent of Detroit is unbelievable.  Just think, the guy who came up with Google, one of the original engineers of the ipod, and even looking all the way back to Motown music or even the Model-T automobile, Michigan has brought greathings to the world.   I truly believe that with the right industry in place, Detroit can thrive once again and Michigan can began to cultivate and utilize its talented workforce.  I’m not the only one who believes this though, there are a number of great organizations labeled business accelerators that have started in Michigan recently to support entrepreneurship and the revitalization of the local economy.  One group in particular that comes to mind is Ann Arbor Spark.

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May 13th 2009….I’ve been pretty busy since one of my team members pointed out that we could submit our business plan to Stanford for funding. We have a couple team members finishing up their masters at Stanford which makes us eligible for their funding cycle.  They’re not offering up much, maybe $20k or so, but that’s enough to jump start the pre-launch campaign and get a digital product demonstration together.

I’m feeling kinda apprehensive about submitting the plan, since it won’t be completely clean, but its always better to try than to pass up opportunity (unless of course you have not completely developed your vision).

I’ll keep it short today because tomorrow I have plans to hit up some Karaoke in K-Town with some broadband industry folk. So I’m gonna organize my thoughts, always want to be on my toes when I meet other people in the industry.