This is a continuing report from the weekly Innovation Breakfast. Once again, conversations ended up touching on funding (among other things.) One of the reasons we started the Funding Friday (#ff$) conversations on Twitter…
This morning’s conversation at Innovation Breakfast touched on information sources: where do you get your information? In today’s world, there is a wealth — an overwhelming wealth — of information. There is so much information it is hard to know where to look first.
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We started off the day thinking about bootstrapping. The early conversations at Innovation Breakfast were about bootstrapping but we were quickly sidetracked with conversations about individual entrepreneurial ventures. (This is a great group to get feedback from if you are working on the early stages of a project.)
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Every week we have some fascinating conversations at Innovation Breakfast. We do introductions, and get to know you and your company but the far-ranging discussions on the industry are among the most compelling reasons to come out to Waltham for coffee on Friday mornings. In keeping with the “Funding Friday” theme (#ff$), we asked for people’s thoughts around getting funded. One experienced entrepreneur told the story of his funding adventures, calling funding a black art, what works once, might not work again.
There are various “happy endings” in funding from the entrepreneurs’ point of view. Funds to go forward building a company. The sale of a company or the product or the IP. The incorporation of technology or the product into another company or another product. Sometimes the intended or expected outcome gets kicked to the curb and something else happens. Looking for funding? Maybe it will end up in a sale. Looking for a sale? Maybe you will end up with partners. People looking for funding need to keep their options open.
For the last several weeks, we’ve been meeting with small groups at the Cafe on the Common in Waltham for Friday morning chats and to see what connections we can make for folks. There’s been a continuing theme: money…it makes the world go round and sometimes, just a little bit would make all the difference in the world to a company on the brink of something big, or small, or medium sized…
Mass Innovation Nights and Innovation Breakfast would like to “hijack” Follow Friday (#ff) in the Boston area and turn every Friday into a Funding Friday (#ff$).
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You always try to go out with a bang…and, boy, did we ever. Bill Warner’s talk on “Startups from the Heart” was fantastic! (Videos are below the break.) And well received by our largest crowd so far. (Yes, we opened up “ticket sales” quite a bit beyond the usual small group.) And, if you were there, you heard us say that Innovation Breakfast is ending. But, wait, what’s that on the horizon?
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Our May 21, 2010 Innovation Breakfast will feature TechStars mentor and serial entrepreneur, Bill Warner. Bill will be discussing how to “Build Your Startup From the Heart.”
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Bringing in Rachel Happe from the Community Roundtable was a sure thing. Note only have I seen Rachel speak several times (and she’s always taught me something new) but the regular lunch time get-togethers hosted by Community Roundtable generally provoke some of the more interesting conversations I am involved in.
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Our April Innovation Breakfast is scheduled for Friday, April 16 at 8:30 am at the IBM Innovation Center, 404 Wyman Street in Waltham. We’ll be talking about Community Management and our discussion leader is Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable, a peer network for community managers and social media practitioners. RSVP now!
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Much thanks to the British Consulate and the UK Trade and Investment group who came to our rescue with a site for our March event. We could have taken up their lovely space all day with the fascinating discussion kicked off by Nick Goggans from Conversion Associates.
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This month’s Innovation Breakfast (Friday, March 19, 8:30 – 10:00 am at the UK Trade & Investments offices, One Broadway, Cambridge, MA, will feature Nick Goggans, the president of Conversion Associates, fresh off SXSW and a tour of several major newspaper publishing offices. Nick will be leading a discussion on “The Future of the Modern Newspaper — a Golden Age or a Death Knell?” (RSVP now!)
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Our February Innovation Breakfast speaker was Shawn Broderick from TechStars. Based in Boulder, TechStars came to Boston last year and Shawn has been a fixture in the Boston Innovation Economy scene ever since. TechStars provides seed capital and mentors for a class of startups every summer. The TechStars decision makers look for companies they think they can help get off the ground and onto the next level.
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While Mass Innovation Nights is unabashedly pro-all-things-MA, we took a more global approach, at least this month with Innovation Breakfast. Our “conversation leader” was Lucian Wagner, general partner from Eurous Ventures, and one of the go-to folks involved with Launch in US, an organization devoted to helping European companies launch in the US and find local partners.
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