Press Releases in 2003
ICON's CEO Alan Bristow Partners with Mike Gera of Pond Venture Partners for Tornado Insider Conference
July 2003
An audience of well over 500 leading VCs, investment banks and CEOs of technology companies gathered on 26 & 27 June 2003 for the London leg of Upstart Europe 2003. The event is Tornado Insider's fourth annual 2-day conference, which brings together Europe's most creative and innovative high-tech players to meet with the industry's established and emerging leaders.
UpStart offers a mix of specialized entrepreneurial and investor presentations, keynote speeches, inspiring workshops, focused and pre-scheduled one-on-one meetings, and quality networking opportunities to enable the key players in the development of high-tech, high-growth Europe to meet, learn, and most importantly, to do business. Speakers included Alan Bristow of ICON who partnered with Mike Gera of leading venture capitalist firm Pond Venture Partners to present a workshop entitled "Where's the money".
The issues Alan and Mike covered during their interactive workshop included the new fund-raising environment for 2003 and its impact on nascent technology companies and the VCs who back them. As a result of the global collapse of tech stocks, shell-shocked VCs are being far more aggressive in their valuations which are sharply down, multi-stage VCs have moved to later stage investments, and the funding bar is now much higher. Mike highlighted how pre bubble valuations had been valued on progress and possibility whereas post bubble valuations are based on clear evidence of success. Figures released by Ventureone show that the majority of VC backed companies at the end of 2002, still needed further funding as they had failed to raise B rounds. Out of 6,093 start ups, 9% had failed, 61% were still needing further funds, 24% had successfully raised additional funding and only 6% had exited.
Alan Bristow of ICON added: "fund raising has always been a difficult process and the market was spoilt by the relative ease of raising money in the late nineties we are now back to more normal market conditions where companies with real substance and visability of delivering are in a great position to get funded, but entrepreneurs and management teams must understand that they themselves must be 'investment ready' if they are to succeed in the battle to win the funding for their business - far too many companies spend time chasing the market for funds when they should be ensuring they have the right fundamentals in place which will appeal to the investment community".
Ultimately despite the funding difficulties for early stage tech companies there are still VCs out there with funds available for companies with strong management teams, a unique proposition, initial traction to demonstrate their commerciality and a clear path to profitability and 2003 will be a great year for innovation and investment, so now is the time to "Get in the Driver's Seat", there is less noise in the market place and the quality businesses are now getting the attention they deserve.
Conference Sponsors included:
Dorsey & Whitney LLP, Siemens Mobile Acceleration, Sun Microsystems, silicon.com, ZDNet UK.
Other speakers included:
Carl Allen of Forrester Research, Daniel Ishag Founder/CEO of Espotting, David Wood Executive VP Partnering of Symbian, Dr. Gideon Samid President/CTO AGS Encryptions Ltd, Jeffrey M. Hurlburt Partner, Dorsey& Whitney LLP, John Stockton Founder, StockLabs Venture Consulting, Mark Craddock Strategy Manager, Xbox Live/Microsoft Corp, Patrick Sheehan Managing Director-West Coast, 3i Corporation , Paul Boutin Technology Journalist, Wired, Slate Magazine, Marcos Baptista Senior Manager, Intel Capital, Mark Aldington Managing Partner, Addventure Partners Ltd, Michael Wand , Director, The Carlyle Group, Mikko Riepula, Managing Director, WiFicom, Paul Harvey, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs, Pete Magowan Partner, Alta Berkeley, Philip Vermeulen Managing Partner, GP Catalyst,Ryan Jarvis, Vice President Partnerships, Swisscom Eurospot AG, Steven Schlenker Managing Director, Digital Networks , Ulrich Bolze Investment Partner, Siemens Mobile Acceleration, Vincenzo Rau Founder, Rau & Cie.
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