Reflections from our experience at VentureNet LA on 10/7/09

Last Wednesday we headed down to Costa Mesa to participate in VentureNet LA. Cogi and 12 other companies were selected as capital preseenters. I only learned on Wednesday that the 13 companies were selected out of a total group of more than 100 startup companies in Southern California. There were about 300 attendees at the conference and the composition seemed to be about one third entrepreneurs, one third Angel investors and VCs and one third vendors and/or professional services. The event was held at the Westin Costa Mesa.

First of all, I have to thank the good folks at the Technology Council of Southern California as they did a great job on the conference. I watched all 13 of the company presentations and, for the most part, they were concise and focused. Each presenter was limited to 10 minutes in total. I will list all 13 of the presenting companies below. But I thought I would give some quick reflections on what I saw.

The winner of the Best In Show award was RightSignature. As a Santa Barbara company, we were proud to see some recognition for another Santa Barbara company (though, of course, we would have preferred to have won)! Daryl Bernstein did a great job on the RightSignature presentation. This company provides a way for individuals to sign documents online using your mouse! But in addition to that, they have clearly thought through the document signing process and how to accomplish something complicated via the Web.

I was particularly impressed with Cyber Rain -- a great new way to track and control your home sprinkler system. It ties into weather forecasts on the web and reduces or increases your watering based on the weather. I can't tell you how many times I have forgotten to turn off the water when it starts raining! Which reminds me, I need to do that tonight!

Serial entrepreneur, Will Schroter presented Affordit.com, which was also an interesting new idea. They plan to enable down-market consumers to purchase expensive items on credit using kind of a lay-away type plan with direct ACH access to these customers' bank accounts.

I was particularly proud of Cogi CEO, Mark Cromack, who did a great job on the Cogi presentation. Though I may be biased, it seemed that everybody in the room was particularly focused on the Cogi presentation -- perhaps because they could all identify with the problem we are solving -- or maybe because of the cool flash demo we used to start our presentation.

After the afternoon presentations, there was a panel discussion by several local VCs, including Jin Andelman of Rincon Ventures, here in Santa Barbara. The panel only mentioned 3 companies speicifically in their discussion: Cogi, Affordit, and TrueCar. Jim Andelman (thank you, Jim), mentioned that he was impressed with the relevant background of the Cogi team as both CallWave and CrystalVoice are examples of successful Internet / Telephony companies.

The keynote presentation by Zorik Gordon of Reach Local was also very impressive. I am going to try to get a copy of his presentation and post it here. Zorik spoke about current trends in Internet marketing, social networking and the Internet in general. Fascinating stuff!

All in all, I came away from the conference feeling enthusiastic about the state of American entrepreneurship and, more specifically, entrepreneurship in Southern California. All of the presenting CEOs were impressive in their own ways. If I could, I would have made small investments in nearly every company.

Here is the complete list of presenting companies:

Ad.ly Inc.


Affordit

Cogi, Inc.

Cyber-Rain

ExpenseBay

FlipGloss Media, Inc.

RightSignature

SharesPost

Social Approach

TrueCar

Viewdle

YouMail

Zadspace, Inc.