Today I participated in a very exciting event which culminated with an announcement by Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts with an important funding milestone – a $1 million annual business plan competition called MassChallenge.
The essence of this announcement is to match the next generation of young aspiring entrepreneurs with numerous sources of capital, most likely local venture capitalists. The Governor has committed the State to match dollars committed by private sector investors to the top entrepreneurs who survive the MassChallenge screening process.
During the course of the events today, my good friend Andy Ory (CEO of Acme Packet) and I moderated a panel stocked with local success stories: Desh Deshpande, Paul Sagan of Akamai, Bob Hower of Advanced Technology Ventures, Scott Savitz of Shoebuy.com, and Brian Shin of Visible Measures. We explored what was and was not working in the region as we try to build great venture-backed companies.
One consistent theme which the panel identified was the lack of broad-based mentorship to help this next generation of great entrepreneurs get started. So here is the commitment that Andy and I made to the audience today: we will recruit 12 great successful CEO’s to work with 12 VC’s to mentor 12 promising young entrepreneurs to launch 12 new companies over the next 12 months. (Admittedly I stated to the audience that it would be 20 in the first year, but upon reflection the alliteration of “12″ worked much better).
Office Hours: So what I will pursue over the next few months with Andy Ory is to see if we can establish “office hours” – that is can we get a dozen successful CEO’s in town to commit to open up their calendars and rolodexes to a dozen promising entrepreneurs. Ideally these CEO’s would serve as non-executive chairmen and possibly provide some initial capital, but more importantly, they would provide guidance and advice. VC’s get paid to see new opportunities so it should be reasonably straight forward for me to line up the investors (maybe I will lean on the board of New England Venture Capital Association, which I happen to chair). And working with organizations such as MassChallenge, and our own deal flow, we should be able to identify a dozen great opportunities which merit funding.
I will keep you posted on our progress.
16 Comments
June 11, 2009 at 8:43 am
Excited that you were able to galvinize the community like this, Michael! Very exciting.
June 11, 2009 at 5:27 pm
thanks, partner. I will be leaning on you to help out!
June 11, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Michael. This is very cool! Evan
June 11, 2009 at 5:23 pm
hope you will get involved…
June 11, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Great idea Michael. Being a young aspiring entrepreneur I can tell you how helpful this would be to me… I would love to be one of the lucky 12!!
June 11, 2009 at 5:25 pm
would enjoy hearing about your plan.
June 11, 2009 at 1:39 pm
We at Boston World Partnerships love the Office Hours concept. Let us know how we can help to make it happen, whether that’s just by helping to spread the word or by actively pitching some of the CEOs we’re connected with. Bravo!
Dave
June 11, 2009 at 5:27 pm
We should talk about it in more detail. I think we have a unique ability to pull together a dozen world-class CEO’s who will be excited to “sponsor” the next generation. Getting the VC’s will be easy – we can call them the “dirty dozen!”
June 11, 2009 at 4:26 pm
This is very exciting.
In addition to CEO-level guidance I wonder whether it might make sense to provide assess to other areas (technical mentoring – via CTOs, marketing mentoring, operations, etc) to these budding entrepreneurs. I’m sure there are plenty of people open to stimulating the local start-up community with their time.
June 11, 2009 at 5:29 pm
bart, nice to hear from you. great suggestion. my focus is on mentoring and capital. obviously these people will want access to all sorts of other assistance. are you volunteering?!?
June 12, 2009 at 11:16 am
Michael, be glad to lend a hand.
June 11, 2009 at 4:27 pm
As an entrepreneur and inventor I’ll be following this development closely. If there’s a chance to participate I’m in!!
June 11, 2009 at 5:27 pm
stay tuned…what are you inventing?
June 15, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Great idea, Michael! I know a lot of the folks from Mass Innovation Nights would be very interested in getting involved in this kind of a program. Heck, I’d sign up for it too — perhaps we might get some of you VCs to hold some of those office hours at Mass Innovation Nights?
June 15, 2009 at 8:58 pm
thanks for the note. I would be interested in learning more.
June 15, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Sure — perhaps we might have an off-line convo? (BTW, StayInMa has been a great partner for us — my thanks to Kate!)