Most people suck at presenting to big groups.  It’s It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to influence journalists, business partners, potential employees, customers and VCs. Francisco Dao came up with the idea of letting 10 companies that weren’t selected for Twiistup to do a presentation the night before to a group of people and let the audience pick one company to win the final slot at Twiistup.  I This was evident at the Twiistup pre-event company pitch last week at UCLA.  Francisco

I’m not even talking about your 12-page Powerpoint presentation that you need to raise venture capital or to talk with potential biz dev partners. Tags: Startup Advice startup technology vc venture capita This is part of my ongoing series of posts and I need to file this one under both Raising Venture Capital and Startup Advice . I

Tonight I was reading a good blog post ( here ) from Sean Powers with Alistair Croll on preparing yourself for the TC50 “bump” – the rise in traffic that a company gets from presenting at TechCrunch 50.  Worth We had scrambled to get a product to market, built our first website, rapidly hired a technology team, raised our seed round of capital ($1.5 If you This is part of my ongoing series “Start-up Lessons” Worth a read on how to maximize the traffic that comes to you site since much of it will be fleeting.

The show kicks off with a great presentation (different every month) and then heads over to Docstoc ’s headquarters for even more, intense networking. Tags: Technology Web Startup Advice CTO internet startup los angeles marketing networking startup army tech networking technology networkin My friend Mark Long recently asked me about networking in Los Angeles. Mark is a CTO, see, and his company, PortBlue , was recently acquired (congrats, Mark!).

My role is to work as part of the team to (1) understand related technologies and technical opportunities, (2) understand and help drive alignment around a vision of where the business should go, and (3) mesh those together to help make disciplined, proactive technical decisions. Technical Strategy I support the technical team to: review short and long-term technology strategies to help direct strategic technical decisions and help to ensure appropriate technology usage, help define needed technical research activities, assess new and emerging technologies to determine application

The “Triple Play” of VC Presentations large part of my series has been outlining what the typical VC PowerPoint presentation should look like.  Some Some readers have commented that in today’s world you shouldn’t even need a PowerPoint presentation – in this era you should always just demo your product.  They’re photo courtesy of Atlanta Braves This is part of my ongoing series “ Pitching a VC .”

via: Mobile RSS Email Alerts Bios: Dion’s Bio January 20th, 2010 The social Web in 2010: The emerging standards and technologies to watch Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 10:38 am Categories: ATOM , Badges , Blogs , Collaboration , Community , Convergence , Enterprise Web 2.0 , Gadgets , Identity 2.0 , Lightweight Service Models , Open APIs , Products , RSS , SaaS , Small Pieces, Loosely Joined , Social Computing , Social Media , Social Networking , Social Software , Social media

I did a presentation about the use of Social Media to a great group of people who mostly are different kinds of service professionals (attorneys, accountants, consultants, etc.). I promised that I would do a follow-up post with some thoughts out of the presentation and providing links. This is that post. Value of Blogging I started the presentation talking about the value of blogging. But rather than believing me, listen to Tom Peters and Seth Godin: . Seth Godin Doesn't matter if anyone reads it. What matters is the metacognition of thinking about what you are going to say. How do you force yourself to describe in three paragraphs why you did something. You are doing it for yourself to become part of the conversation even if it's very small. Tom Peters No single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important in my life than blogging. It has changed my life.

There is one classic mistake that I see across both types of meetings – “the tell & sell”  presentation.  This This involves a person who leads a PowerPoint presentation in which the presenter feels more comfortable racing through pre-practiced slides and rattling off charts & bullet points than having a discussion. The presenter comes out of the meeting proud at having gotten through all 30 slides (and maybe This is part of my blog series “ Pitching a VC .” 8221;

I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies. I recently read a post that called this a Consulting CTO and suggested: Founders of startups use a consulting CTO when they have business vision but limited knowledge of the technology needed to launch their company. That same post said that finding part-time, consulting CTOs is fairly hard. In December 2007, I described how I commonly take on an Acting CTO Role in a Start-up . I used an image from Roger Smith that describes