Hub Ventures and Village Capital Investments

Hub Ventures and Village Capital are proud to announce that three social enterprises from the Spring 2011 cohort of Hub Ventures have been selected by their peers to receive $75,000 each in seed funding.

The three ventures are:  San + Co, founded by Swapnil Chaturvedi; Cloud Currencies, founded by Jon Underwood; and The Hoop Fund, founded by Patrick Donohue.These companies were chosen through an innovative peer selection process pioneered by Village Capital that puts investment decisions into the hands of the Hub Ventures program participants. Funding for each company will be split evenly between the Hub Ventures fund and First Light Ventures.

[Week Ten] Hub Ventures : Preparation of Hub Ventures Investor Day

This week Wes Selke, Hub Ventures Director and Investment Manager at Good Capital, led a session that covered due diligence processes and how to keep the momentum going after presenting to investors to increase the chances of the companies raising capital. The due diligence process is fairly complicated, and there is a lot of information that potential investors will want to see.

The workshop covered the important resources to put together to expedite the process such as company profiles, personal references, financial reports, legal documents, etc.

This session was in preparation to Hub Ventures Investor Day, which is coming up on June 16.

Hub Ventures Snapshot: rippleQ

The Customer discovery catharsis

There is a sublime moment of clairvoyance when an early stage entrepreneur realizes that his approach to starting a new high-growth venture has been wrong.  Namely when he comes to understand that he is not building out a new business but instead searching for one.  When you’ve given up your job, taken on so much risk and are smack in the middle of the start-up process, this is a very powerful moment of realization that I’m calling the “Customer Discovery Catharsis” in reference to Steve Blank’s famous Customer Development approach to starting up a new company (google his name and Customer Development to learn more).

[Week Eight] Hub Ventures: How to Deliver a Winning Investor Presentation

This week was all about proper delivery and content for giving high quality presentations. Paul Weiss, who helps companies going through the Keiretsu Forum with their presentation skills, led the evening.

To start off, Paul invited Nick Mueller from a company called There to give a presentation that demonstrated proper delivery and specific topics that need to be covered when presenting to a group of investors. Gene Chien, the Entrepreneur Director for Keiretsu Forum, then spoke about the Keiretsu process and gave some great pointers about what to pay attention to and what to avoid.

[Week Seven] Hub Ventures : Thinking Like An Investor

Penelope Douglas, who founded Pacific Community Ventures and is currently the Board President for Hub Bay Area and SOCAP, spoke about “Thinking Like an Investor.”

The workshop focused on two topics.  First, the discussion was around what investors are looking for in entrepreneurs and their businesses.  What are the key indicators that investors look for in ventures that they are considering investing in?

[Week Six] Hub Ventures : Leveraging Human Capital

This week in Hub Ventures, we dove into the topic of Leveraging Human Capital: How to attract world class talent to your organization, especially when financial resources are slim. Companies are always trying to figure out how to divide up equity and reward employees in an equitable manner.

The conversation began with Arno Harris from Recurrent Energy talking about his experience hiring various teams, what you are looking for in talent, and how to retain the best people. The topic then switched to a more straight forward explanation of equity structures and some do’s and don’ts to be aware of when offering stock options and equity to employees. One of the biggest points was to be aware of offering percentages, because