Imagine this: You're in front of a roomful of strangers. You're looking for money from the people hosting this event, but so
are more than a dozen other would-be entrepreneurs in the room. What's more, these rivals get to vote on your presentation -- and
you get to vote on theirs. The best one wins -- losers go home empty-handed -- and you have just 60 seconds to make your case.
Is this a scene from the next Fox reality-based game show: Who Wants To Be an Entrepreneur? Not at all. Venture-capital
fever is so hot that Draper Atlantic -- the Reston (Va.) affiliate of Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson -- conducts this entrepreneurial cattle call once a month in hopes of snatching new ideas while they're still in their infancy. The rules say ideas must be submitted at the prebusiness-plan stage, so would-be entrepreneurs who are still dreaming of quitting their current jobs can float their ideas at these sessions, dubbed Fastpitch. What Draper gets is a head start over rival VC firms on the best new ideas. What entrepreneurs get is an education -- albeit an abrupt one -- on honing their pitches for would-be investors.
Although Fastpitch uses a baseball metaphor, the two-month-old program is a variant of the old "elevator pitch." That's when
you run into some big venture capitalist in an elevator, and as you ride up to the 19th floor, you pitch your idea and shove a
card in his or her hand.
ONE WINNER. Fastpitch works like this: You apply on netpreneur.org's Web site to be able to present your
dot-com idea at the next monthly meeting. Netpreneur selects 18 applicants to participate. Each Fastpitch event has nine
"innings," during which two entrepreneurs have a minute each to present their ideas. Then the other 16 entrepreneurs vote on
which of the two was better.
Each of the nine winners gets to give a three-minute pitch to a team of Draper folks as well as a
guest judge who may be a successful entrepreneur or a venture capitalist from another firm. This group picks one winner. The
prize: An hour of consulting time from netpreneur to get their business plan in motion and the opportunity to make a formal
presenatation to Draper Atlantic at a later date. The top two runners-up are invited to return to a subsequent Fastpitch for
another 60-second stint.
If nothing else, it's a great way to help entrepreneur wannabes boil their ideas down to the essentials. "In 60 seconds you
can identify your market, the basic value proposition of your business, and why it's a big idea," says Fran Witzel, a
vice-president of netpreneur.org who helped to develop Fastpitch. Debutantes also find they're able to learn from each other and
get useful feedback from experienced venture-capital players.
Draper, of course, is hoping to find the next Bill Gates. The company already has $800 million of funds under management with
101 companies in its portfolio. Some of its big successes in 1999 included the IPOs of GoTo.com, NetZero, and WIT Capital.
UNIFORMED JUDGE. But for netpreneur, the sessions are part of a larger mission. "We are educating entrepreneurs about
how the process works," says Witzel. Netpreneur is the Web site affiliate of the Morino Institute, the brainchild of Mario
Morino, who built Legent Software into an industry giant before selling it for $1.8 billion in 1995 to Computer Associates.
Subsequently, he created the self-named, nonprofit organization to jump start Internet entrepreneurs. But his support goes beyond just financial: Morino appeared as one of the judges at the inaugural Fastpitch in January sporting a Cleveland Indians uniform.
So what do entrepreneurs learn? "One of the first things we share is that frequently the ideas are not unique -- the venture
capitalist has usually heard it before, and we see similar ideas coming up in our Fastpitch applications," says Witzel. To keep
the events interesting, netpreneur tries to diversify the actual pitches it chooses for presentation each month. In the first two
rounds this year, ideas have covered such areas as B2B publishing, Net-delivered medical research, Chinese Web sites, and
Internet-enabling technology.
Participants generally told frontier they found the experience fun and educational -- after their turn was over. Most were too
nervous to hear the presentations that came before their own. "I learned a lot from watching other people about the concept and
language that will appeal to an investor," says Jeff Giesea, who was a runner-up in January and won the February contest with a
B2B publishing idea. "It helped me understand the perspective of the venture capitalist."
"UNFILTERED STUFF." Draper Atlantic's motives are pure business. They, and whoever the guest judge is, get the chance
to jump on a good idea early, as well as scout for potential entrepreneurial talent who might fit into other projects. "These are
people who aren't doing it for a living and who might be missed" by the normal VC channels, says John Backus, managing partner of
Draper Atlantic. "We're seeing the raw, unfiltered stuff." The idea has caught on with Draper's offices around the country, and
the firm is now in discussions with netpreneur to roll out Fastpitch nationwide.
"Most VCs work with experienced high-tech professionals," says Witzel. "Fastpitch is building a network with people who are
not in technology. It's bringing new blood into the equation." Sounds great -- so long as they understand that actually building
a business takes a little longer than 60 seconds.
By
Margaret Popper
in New York
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