Blogs

Oregon BEST Announces Commercialization Grants

On July 21, Oregon BEST announced a Commercialization Grant Program to accelerate the commercialization of technologies developed by universities and small businesses in Oregon collaborating with Oregon BEST’s member faculty.   Beginning on July 19, 2010, Oregon BEST will accept Commercialization Grant proposals from Oregon BEST member faculty (University Partner).  They have up to $225,000 to invest in the form of grants of up to $75,000 each to teams that include one or more University Partner and a

Congressman Wu Convenes Cyber Security Experts

On Wednesday, July 7, 2010, Congressman Wu convened a panel of Cyber Security experts at OTBC to discuss "the growing challenges faced by their industry and the impact of pending federal policy on computing safety and our economy".  Attendees included Brad Ketch, CEO of Safety Plan, Inc., and a graduate of OTBC's FastTrac TechVenture program.  As Brad put it:

OTBC Becomes Certified Councelor in EDLF Micro-Loan Program

OTBC was recently certified by Business Oregon as a business counselor for the Entrepreneurial Development Loan Fund (EDLF) program.   The EDLF is a micro-loan program that provides intial loans of up to $25,000, and a follow-on loan of up to $15,000, to Oregon entrpreneurs.   It assists micro-enterprise and small businesses and fills a niche not provided through traditional lending markets. 
 
The fund has the following qualification criteria:

How to find a start-up

Are you interested in finding a start-up to join?  If so, here are some ideas on how to find one.
 

Oregon rolls out BOOST program

In an effort to promote immediate job growth, the Oregon Legislature in its 2010 special Legislative Session created a new program for small, traded sector businesses in Oregon.   The Building Opportunities for Oregon Small Business Today (BOOST) program, housed at the Oregon Business Development Department – Business Oregon - is for qualifying small businesses with 100 or fewer employees that propose to create or retain jobs.  

Where Start-ups Go Wrong

Larry Wasserman, an experienced COO/CFO who has been a part of and consulted with many start-ups (a dozen or so) provided an excellent presentation this week for the OTBC FastTrac TechVenture program on managing start-up operations.  Larry summarized the ways he has seen start-ups go wrong in their approach to operations management:

One Sentence Challenge

In a blog post at Start-up CFO, Mark MacLeod repeated this comment from an executive who ran a portfolio company of venture capital firm Sequoia:

          ... there is a widely held belief inside Sequoia that those startups
          that can explain themselves in one sentence tend to have a much
          higher success rate than those that do not.

Are You Smarter than an Attorney?

Find out on March 30, 4pm, at OTBC, when we'll pose questions about common start-up legal issues, and compare your answers with the answers of two Perkins Coie attorneys, Neil Nathanson and Jeff Bock.  Learn more and register at this link.

Predicting Start-up Success

At a March 9 presentation at OTBC, Thomas Thurston, President and Managing Director of Growth Science International, LLC,  discussed the research he performed that involved predicting start-up success based on whether or not they used a disruptive innovation strategy.

Why Investors will Not Fund your Alpha Development

Fairly often, I have meetings like on I had this past week, with a very passionate entrepreneur who believed he was investor ready, and just needed some introductions to investors.  I had to explain why he wasn't really investor ready, which is never a very fun discussion.  We've had various events and one full day seminar at OTBC on the topic of getting investor ready, but the issue comes up often enough, I thouht I'd try to writing down the thought process as simply and directly as I can.  (Perhaps painfully directly, but that's often what it takes.)