Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Venture Capital for 2008?

The topic at the monthly IEEE CVT luncheon today in Richardson was High Tech Venture Capital funding for North Texas in 2008. The two panelists were Ron Jennings, Partner and CTO of STARTech Early Ventures, a business incubator for developing technology in the Telecom Corridor, and Alexander Muse, Serial Entrepreneur and Founder of Texas Startup Blog. The panelists discussed what was good and what went wrong with VC funding in 2007 as well as looking forward into what to expect in 2008.

Not being an entrepreneur, I do however work for one; Tad McIntosh, CEO and Founder of HumCap, so I do have a somewhat vested interest in the subject. The conclusion was that there is VC funding available now… in fact more than ever before. (Looks like I will have job security for at least a few more years.;) The only difference is now that the VC’s are being much more conservative with their money and how it is distributed. The good news is that more and more entrepreneurs are bootstrap funding and exploring alternate investing which is resulting in more successful acquisitions than before the bubble burst.

On a small world note… Alexander Muse introduced me to blogging back in 2006 when he mentioned a search I was conducting for a client in the IPTV space on his blog. I was able to meet him this afternoon and thank him personally for helping me with that search and also inspiring me to start my own blog.

Friday, December 07, 2007

How Social is Your Network?

After receiving yet another "invitation to join my network" from Plaxo, Zing, Zoom, Boom, et al... I wonder just how many social networks are too many? If I spent all my time joining networks, posting and updating bloggs, and attending networking events, there would be no time left for recruiting. This conundrum makes me wonder if all the really great, prolific bloggers out there are strictly in management, independently working or do they stay up late into the wee hours of the morning updating and posting?