coclarity

After the business incubation day seminar I’m beginning to think this recession might be a good thing. At the very least there’s a bit of a silvery tinge on the dark clouds. You’ll find slides from the seminar on the EAC website, but as usual the more interesting stuff happened over the tea and biscuits.

During his talk, Richard Grey from Matheson Ormsby Prentice described the fairly complex legal process in bringing in VC investment. While smaller investments from angels might not need to go through all these steps some steps are still relevent. You can wait until you have a term sheet before getting a legal firm involved but the final term sheet should be fairly detailed (5-ish pages). The costs on the company side should be lower as the legal fees are mostly to respond to a term sheet (he mentioned a figure of approx 3000 euros).

Frank Walsh of Enterprise Equity gave an overview of the investment process from a VC point of view. In the midst of all the recession news they are still closing deals.

I asked Richard if they had any plans to open source neutral legal agreements like Y Combinator are doing with WSGR in the US. Unfortunately, the answer is no, but surely this is a great opportunity for some legal firm in Ireland.

Sometimes the best part of these kinds of seminars are the discussions with other attendees that happen afterwards. This is where the silverish lining emerged. Some people believed while the VCs are becoming more cautious they will still do deals albiet less deals and reduce the reduce the average investment. That might put them into the investment range of many of the Web/Software companies who are looking for €200-400k investments. This class of companies have been in a bit of an investment vaccum recently as commented by Fergus Burns in Joe Drumgoole’s post about VCs in crisis.

Then yesterday the Irish government announced a new plan to setup a €500 million investment fund involving three US-based venture capital companies backing small Irish and foreign-owned high-tech companies setting up in Ireland.

So I’m thinking maybe this recession is a good things for smaller companies, the 95% of companies who didn’t need enough cash to register on VC radar in the past. Maybe these companies will even get some of the help the government seem to be trying to give them in this latest announcement. Then again maybe I’m a niave optimist.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Apparently there’s an International Incubation Day (whatever will they think of next). It’s all happening this Monday 8th December 11am at the Enterprise Acceleration Centre on the LIT campus in Limerick. There’ll be tea, coffee, sandwiches, networking, and talks on the legal process (Richard Grey, Matheson Ormsby Prentice) and getting from agreement to a cheque (Frank Walsh, Enterprise Equity).

Given the current economic climate it will probably be a highly theoretical discussion. So if you want to talk to some VCs and ask them some sticky questions, Limerick could be the place to be on Monday.

I drove to Cork yesterday to go to Sabrina Dent’s Blogging Masterclass. This post is about things I learned and some other blogging links I found useful. Now you might be a seasoned blogger already, and thinking, “Oh God NO!, not another newbie post about blogging”, but read on because maybe there’s something here that might refresh your view of this blogging lark. Then again maybe there isn’t.

So in the cold light of day, I sat down at the computer to catch up on email and do some work. Then I remembered the old advice about training, “If you don’t do something within 72 hours you’ve wasted your time going to the training”. That’s when I decided to write a blog post about blogging because I couldn’t resist doing something that meta.

Anyway, here’s some of the more interesting stuff I learned yesterday:

• Write like a person, not a company.
• Be a resource, no hard sell.
• Don’t write a blog post about all the things you’re going to write about. Just write about them.
• Avoid buzz phrases.
• There’s some serious etiquette around blogging. If you do anything dodgy you’ll be lambasted from a high. So no astroturfing or copyright infringement.
• Use tools (feedburner, google analytics, etc.)

After some slides, Sabrina reviewed everyone’s blog posts and gave them “feedback”. Of course my draft was woeful. I got some serious flashbacks to Timmy Frawley’s Irish classes in fifth year. That’s one blog post that will never see the light of the interpipes.

In fairness though, this reality check was worth the price of the masterclass (free), my joyful time in Cork’s rush-hour traffic (logjammed), and the drive up & down the N20 (bumpy and rainy).

So then when I got home I fired up OmniFocus and found all the old links I’d saved in my “start the blog” project. I found Damien’s Dipping Your Toes in the Business Blogging Water. I read Chris Brogan’s Best Advice About Blogging.

So here I am, blogging again after a long hiatus and one or two earlier attempts. Many thanks to Sabrina for her advice, and apologies in advance as I proceed to forget & ignore half of it. Best of luck to my classmates Joe Scanlon, Mike and Matt Kane, Julian Alubaidy, Aedan Ryan, Gordon Murray, Keith Shirley, and Linda FitzPatrick.

That’s all for now, I’ll be back in a few days with some tips on dealing with “Information Overload” (especially for Sabrina ;-)!!!…

Are there any other good summaries out there on how to blog while avoiding the pitfalls?