JumpStart: IdeaExchange Blog

If you are an entrepreneur and are currently raising equity capital — check out the upcoming JumpStart Angel Fair. The fair will be held on Tuesday, October 26th from 11:30am to 4pm at the Wolstein Center in Cleveland. Over 100 angel investors are expected to attend, and all participants will be invited to attend JumpStart’s Annual Community Meeting taking place immediately following from 3:30pm to 6pm.

If you are interested, complete the online application form by 5pm on September 10th. A selection committee made up of investors and entrepreneurial support professionals from around the state will review the applications and select 12 companies to present. Companies will be notified the week of September 20th of their status.

As part of the day’s events, selected companies will take part in the Entrepreneur Showcase at JumpStart’s Annual Meeting to continue their conversations with investors, speak with other entrepreneurs, and share their company stories with other event attendees.

The last Angel Fair we hosted attracted over 100 angel investors and presenting companies went on to raise over $11 million in equity capital. We expect to have the same great turnout (if not better) at this year’s Fair and are excited about once again bringing our state’s most promising company opportunities and serious angel investors together in one room.

This is a great forum to showcase your company and pitch to an audience of qualified angel investors. Make sure to fill out your application today!

Kerri Breen is the Vice President of External Finance for JumpStart Ventures and works directly with our portfolio companies to secure additional growth capital. Kerri brings experience in capital markets, banking, public and private offerings of debt and equity securities, corporate mergers and acquisitions, and real estate asset dispositions. Kerri received her MBA with a focus on finance from the Weatherhead School of Management and her BA in marketing from Ohio State University.

In June, I told Crain’s Cleveland Business that startup companies should always be on the lookout for talent, even before a formal need or open position exists. As Findaway co-founder, Christopher Celeste once said, “I’m climbing a mountain and always looking for mountain climbers.” Indeed, getting to the Promised Land requires that entrepreneurs be opportunistic both about spotting market needs and top talent. Likewise, job seekers should always be interviewing prospective employers. I’m not saying that you should have your resume with you at all times or be out on the street looking for better opportunities instead of doing your job. I mean that every interaction (with partners, co-workers, managers, subordinates, consultants, customers, Ted from Accounting…) is and should be treated with the same care and respect as a job interview. Great results, hard work, diligence, and respect never go unnoticed, regardless of the audience. Credibility and trust are like baggage (the good sort): they travel with you wherever you go, and prove beneficial in some of the most unexpected ways.

This all might seem obvious. That’s because it is obvious. However, most people make two mistakes. First, many people see their professional relationships as a one-way affair. “If I sell to you or work for you, I’d better treat you well and be on my game. If I buy from you or you work for me, who cares?” However, when you become a job seeker (or the more politically correct, “professionals in transition”), everyone you’ve ever known, in any capacity, becomes an ally (or impediment) in the journey to your next job. Second, it’s just as important that you create opportunities to work, engage and network with people in a real way. With all of the tools available to connect with people, from blogs and Twitter to global discussion groups and social networks, we cannot replace good, old-fashioned relationships. Earning trust and credibility is still a contact sport. Engaging with a broad and diverse network of people creates opportunities for you to grow professionally and make an impact. This is not just about passing out your business card or attending as many networking cocktail hours as you can. It’s about getting to know people, providing value, and bringing people together in ways that create opportunities. Finally, many people neglect keeping their relationships fresh and real, or forming new ones, until they need something (like a job). Don’t be that guy/gal who only calls when they need something.

A couple of stories…

In 2005, I was living in London and looking for a job. A year prior, I had been transferred to the UK by Netflix to help launch their first (and heretofore last) attempt at expanding their DVD-by-mail service into an international market. After Netflix pulled the plug to fend off competition at home (my wife and I decided to stay in London), I spent three months in formal interviews for a job with eBay’s European business development group. Three months! The same day that I finally received an offer, I learned of a different position at Apple that was a perfect fit with my background and would give me a chance to do what I had hoped to do with Netflix — launch an American product into European markets. I interviewed for the position, received an offer and accepted in six days. Bam! How did it go down so quickly? I wish I could say that it was my incredible ability to close. The truth is that I started interviewing for the position three years earlier.

In 2002, I was working at a Virgin Mobile, partnering with independent record labels whose catalogs we wanted to convert into ringtones and sell to our wireless subscribers. To help broker introductions, and to advise on the deals, I worked with a consultant who came out of the music industry and had previously founded his own record label. He’s the guy that recommended me for the Apple opportunity three years later. But wait, there’s more. Prior to joining Netflix, I had talked to a recruiter about a position — one that didn’t quite match my skills — at Apple. Though I didn’t get that job, the very same recruiter was staffing the position in London two years later. She knew me and my work by that time and expedited the interview process (over pints in a Covent Garden pub).

While at Apple, I was able to sit on the other side of this equation. Our group grew from five to thirty people in two years and we were always looking for smart and entrepreneurial people to recruit to our team. While working on a co-marketing deal, the project manager assigned to the deal by our marketing partner impressed me with his work ethic, smarts, and personal style. He wasn’t interviewing, or even looking for a job. He actually had an awesome job. But to me, every interaction with him was another interview where he came through with flying colors. A few months after the project was completed, we created a position for him on our team. He’s still at Apple today, doing great work. This is one of a half-dozen instances where I’ve found great people and recruited them to join my team outside of a formal interview process.

Many of the job seekers I meet lament the fact that the only professional relationships that they have are with a handful of former co-workers. These are important, to be sure. After all, Ted from Accounting can open doors or act as a reference to your next employer. But most people don’t think of their customers, subordinates, or vendors that work for them as future opportunities as well. Be sure to treat all of these relationships with care, and to keep them fresh and real in good times and bad. With startups, this is especially important, since serial entrepreneurs love getting the band back together. Companies start, grow, and crash really fast in startup land. So a team might work together through multiple iterations and incarnations. By actively engaging with a wide sphere of contacts in real ways that demonstrate your Adaptive Excellence and winning charm, you have a safety net(work) when you need it most.

Robert Hatta is the Vice President of Entrepreneurial Talent for JumpStart Ventures. He has worked at several startup companies in Northeast Ohio and Silicon Valley, as well as other high growth, technology companies across the U.S. and Europe. Through these experiences, Robert has gained an extensive understanding of the culture and needs of high growth companies with a particular focus on talent.

PerfectPitch, the national competition in which entrepreneurs pitch their ideas via a video submission and can end up presenting to the country’s leading venture capitalists, debuted in 2009 with truly 2009 marketing techniques (including the opportunity for an entrepreneur to pitch based on who submitted the best Twitter pitch).

It’s now back again and as with last year, entrepreneurs who are able to react quickly have an advantage. (The deadline is August 26th, which is two weeks away). Here’s what you do:

• Submit your pitch ONLINE - a pitch may include a written description, photos, and video about your BUSINESS or IDEA
• Deadline for submissions is August 26th, 2010. Early applicants will receive helpful feedback and may make edits to improve their pitches
• Judges will review all pitches – Top 3 win prizes and an invitation to pitch LIVE to investors and the audience of the PerfectBusiness Summit 2010

You can find full details here on entering, including the list of investors representing over $10 billion in assets who will be judging. (Did I mention that JumpStart’s own Ray Leach is one of the judges, as is North Coast Angel’s Todd Federman and venture capitalists from leading investors such as DFJ and Google?)

Cathy Belk is the Chief Relationship Officer of JumpStart. She specializes in branding, marketing communications, and business and relationship management. She brings 16+ years of experience in a variety of marketing and business roles, but gets her energy from working daily with entrepreneurs and their growing companies.

Entrepreneur magazine’s August 2010 edition featured a story “50 really cool cities to start your business,” or as they further detailed, “the 50 cities and 10 lifestyles energizing businesses of all shapes and size.” These types of lists are always fun to read for the selections that are surprising, or redemptive, or just plain right. I never thought of Jackson, Wyo. as a great place for entrepreneurship (it’s under the “great outdoors” category). Great to see Pittsburgh was the leader on the list of “recovery and rebirth;” the collective leaders there deserve it. And while San Diego was on the “living in paradise” list (it really is paradise there, for entrepreneurs and residents alike), I was surprised to see Albuquerque.

But as I skimmed the list, I realized it quickly: not a single community in Ohio was on the list. Clearly, I have my media relations work cut out for me. But just to make sure that the Entrepreneur folks don’t have to work too hard to learn about the assets of Ohio — or Northeast Ohio in particular — I thought I’d go ahead and list my contributions here. (And please be sure to let me know what I’ve missed)!

• The great outdoors: “…where peaks and valleys are more than just points on the graph”
  Northeast Ohio actually does have peaks (such as in Summit County) and valleys (such as the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, ranked as the eighth most visited national park in the country alongside parks like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon), but it may be less well-known that Northeast Ohio is actually an outdoorsman’s dream, with lakes and rivers (as well as one of the Greats - Erie) for fishing, thousands of acres of parks nicknamed the Emerald Necklace, and hundreds of thousands of acres for hunting. Lorain and its larger western neighbor, Sandusky, not only offer several of the best trout fishing clubs but also has the GLIDE incubator and the Lorain County Community College Innovation Fund, a pre-seed fund investing $25,000 and $100,000 grants in promising entrepreneurial companies from across Northeast Ohio.
• City life: “higher costs, higher stakes but even higher visibility”
  There are not really any places in Northeast Ohio where “higher costs” is a reality; cost of living in this region indexes 93 relative to the national average. But obviously, the biggest city here with the biggest visibility is Cleveland itself, and almost 50% of JumpStart Ventures’ 48 portfolio companies are located in the city of Cleveland. When you consider all the ecosystem elements in Cleveland — from CWRU to Founders’ Café and Gorilla Group, from JumpStart and MAGNET to Cuyahoga County’s Opportunities Technology Fund — Cleveland should make the list.
• Recovery and rebirth: “cities on the mend, where even the smallest business can make a big difference”
  I’m always very impressed with Akron. With its own incubator (the Akron Global Business Accelerator), an investment fund for Israeli companies looking to expand in Akron, and the reinvention of the downtown area (including the minor league Akron Aeros, new restaurants, and early-stage companies such as ECHOGEN Power Systems), Akron has really transformed itself from the former “Rubber Capital of the World” to the new “polymer capital of the world” (so to speak).
• Living in paradise: “why wait until retirement to enjoy a life of sun, surf, and sand?”
  Aside from golf courses, there’s still plenty of sand and sun (at least in the summer months) up on Lake Erie, with some of the most beautiful beaches in some of the eastern suburbs of the city. Also on the eastern side of Cleveland are the communities that get the most snow in the winter (in case that’s your version of paradise). The eastern suburbs of Cleveland - including Mentor, Mayfield, and Willoughby, — are home to some of the fastest growing biotech companies in the area, such as STERIS, QED, and Neuros Medical. The area’s proximity to Cleveland Clinic and other healthcare cluster participants, along with very pleasant places to live, make it worth noticing.
• Creative centers: “…where creativity and capitalism make sweet music together”
  Oberlin is one of the most creative places in the country, with its brilliant, quirky counter-culturalism embraced by both its students and its residents. Oberlin College’s unique entrepreneurship programs (which include funding for student-run businesses) have not only created a few student-run startups, but attracted other companies — such as Greenfield Solar — to savor the culture. And don’t forget the Oberlin Conservatory, which really is generating sweet music.
• Family-friendly: “…where company and family can both grow up right”
  Everywhere in Ohio is family-friendly, but nowhere more so than Northeast Ohio. One of my favorite thriving entrepreneurial centers for families is Chagrin Falls, nestled in the rolling hills 30 miles southeast of Cleveland. Good public schools, a charming town center complete with natural waterfall, and a burgeoning entrepreneurial community including standouts such as CerviLenz make this one worth the list.
• Off the grid: “…where entrepreneurs have the latitude to forge their own paths”
  Youngstown offers one of the best examples of this I’ve noticed for years. With its location halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, the YBI, and focus on B-to-B software development, Youngstown State and its student community, and the revitalization of various parts of the city, it’s an area ripe for entrepreneurs desiring to make their own way.
• Green scenes: “where capitalism meets eco-consciousness”
  Wooster, in the heart of Wayne County 45 miles west of Akron, is the home of ABSMaterials, one of the companies providing solutions to BP to clean up after the gulf oil crisis. The technology came right out of the College of Wooster’s chemistry lab, which isn’t a surprise given the initiatives run by the Center for Entrepreneurship at the college — whether they include brainstorms on Thursdays (complete with popcorn) or entrepreneurship programs for the area’s incarcerated.
• College towns: “start a business, and learn a thing or two”
  As if Wooster and Oberlin weren’t enough, there are a host of other college towns in the area all fostering entrepreneurship individually and together — from Berea (Baldwin Wallace College) to Hiram (Hiram College), from Ashland (Ashland University) to Painesville (Lake Erie College), and many others. But one of the best examples is Kent, which balances a quaint college town feel with the resources and heft of the state’s third largest university, Kent State. The University’s Center for Entrepreneurship has led to office hours for entrepreneurs and the start of the region’s own incubator, in addition to local entrepreneurial superstar Kent Displays.
• Small towns, big opportunities: “small ponds where your business can be a big fish”
  Have you been to Canton? Besides the Football Hall of Fame, this small city has a historical legacy of entrepreneurship. The three largest private employers there of the last 100 years — Timken, Diebold, and Hoover — were all started by entrepreneurs who found a community more than excited to embrace their ideas. The city’s leaders are energizing entrepreneurship again, and entrepreneurs interested to start high-growth businesses will find themselves more than embraced.

Cathy Belk is the Chief Marketing Officer of JumpStart. She specializes in branding, marketing communications, and business management. She brings 16+ years of experience in a variety of marketing and business roles, but gets her energy from working daily with entrepreneurs and their growing companies.