VCs Paying to Pitch Entrepreneurs

Larry Chiang writes about hacking business and school. After a Harvard Business School keynote, they wrote: “What They Don’t Teach You at Stanford Business School“. If you read his scandalously awesome “What They STILL Don’t Teach You at Stanford About Getting Revenge” and, “What They STILL Don’t Teach at GSB About Public Speaking” you will like his latest post about Getting VCs to Pitch Us Entrepreneurs.

If you spend 60 minutes reading his stuff, you’ll be street smart by St Patrick’s Day.

By Larry Chiang

VCs now pitching start-ups.

Dave McClure is leading a new charge where VCs are doing outreach and education to stimulate deal flow. He is at Founders Fund.

Who are VCs trying to charm?! — waves of entrepreneurs able to launch lean start-ups.

Sales oriented VCs like McClure romance entrepreneurs by reaching out to influencers like Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter), Eric Reis (blogger), or Marcus Nelson (UserVoice/SalesForce). These influencers are the people who entrepreneurs look to for guidance, advice and support.

Smart VCs are also “speak-sponsoring”… it’s where they speak and sponsor simultaneously. For example, at Stanford, David Hornik of August Capital introduces VIP guest speakers and hosts Fraiche frozen yogurt receptions.

(cc) Kenneth Yeung – thelettertwo.com

A third component to speak-sponsoring is producing afterparties to tech conferences and events. On a small scale, Second Market hosted the green room at Girls In Tech Conference. Second Market provides VCs, LPs and founders liquidity to pre-IPO companies. Brita Moeller, VP of Private Markets, revealed, “For a small sum of money I got access to all the speakers basically coming to me in the green room.”

Another example is when Canaan Partners hosted Web 2.0 Summit afterparty. They paid for an event at the Swank St Regis to get entrepreneur deal flow. The Web 2.0 Summit was at the Westin and Canaan decided to upgrade the entrepreneur experience and use a five star resort

(cc) Kenneth Yeung – thelettertwo.com

Bryan Chao, senior associate at Canaan said, “Nothing activates our brand more than supporting entrepreneurs”. Canaan gave away a booth that allowed a non portfolio company to showcase and promote as if they were already Canaan portfolio company.

VCs pitching entrepreurs is also happening at South by Southwest (SXSW). For the first time at SXSW, there is the Reverse VC Pitch event. It has VCs pitching entrepreneurs. Recently, at Stanford, Luke Nosek of Founders Fund pitched (Video) http://bit.ly/vc0224v.

The upcoming event Sunday March 14 has over a dozen top venture firms including GRP, Bessemer, First Found, Benchmark, Austin Ventures, Draper Fisher, S3, Shasta, Sierra and more.

Good luck working it and crash my Reverve VC Pitch Party on March 14.

I wrote this in 40 minutes. If I missed something, email me… larry @larrychiang dot com and include your cell in the subject line.

DISCLOSURE: I started the credit company that changed an industry Duck9. I make money selling credit cards to college students and I got a bill passed that outlaws 90+% of my competitors. The new law takes effect Feb 2010 and is called Student Credit Card Protection Act of 2009. Before credit card companies used to screw college students. Now, college students have the tables turned in their favor. Yes, I plan on doing this college marketing job until 2069 (I’ll be 90 then Text or call me during office hours 11:11am or 11:11pm PST +/-11 minutes on my cell: 650-283-8008.

Larry Chiang is the founder of Duck9 , which educates college students on how to establish and maintain a FICO score over 750. He is a frequent contributor to BusinessWeek. His earlier posts on GigaOm include: How to Work The Room ; 8 Tips On How to Get Mentored ; and 9 VCs You’re Gonna Want To Avoid . You can read more equally funny, but non-founder-focused-lessons on Larry’s Amazon blog .