Welcome to the 1st ever Virtual Goods Summit

I am producing this awesome conference, the Virtual Goods Summit, with my friend Charles Hudson.   We wanted to put together a conference that moved the dialogue beyond “Virtual Worlds: Hype or Not” to discussions that can inform meaningful industry evolution and actual implementation.  With companies like Tencent ($500M+ yearly revenue) and Habbo Hotel ($65M yearly revenue) generating a significant portion of their revenue from virtual goods, it’s clear that virtual goods represent a real, viable business model and will likely have a huge impact across all of the consumer Internet.  [update: Note that this isn't just for people interested in gaming.  There's a reason we only have one session related explicitly to virtual goods in gaming & entertainment!]

What: Virtual Goods Summit 2007
When: June 22, 2007 from 10 AM – 5 PM
Where: Annenberg Auditorium Stanford University

Virtual goods and virtual currencies are growing beyond their traditional
roots in online gaming and beginning to exert growing influence on the
development of social networks, community sites, and casual games. This
growing influence is due in large part to the fact that consumers have shown
a willingness to embrace virtual goods as a way to express themselves
online. From pets to coins to avatars, virtual goods are becoming a real
opportunity for companies who are looking to build more engaging online
experiences:

The Launch of CRV Entrepreneur Idol

First, thanks to:

Valerie Cunningham and Net Jacobsson for these photos.  John Furrier and Podtech for podcasting the event.  Stanford MBA2 John Anderson and CRV’s Kim Morioka for helping us coordinate the event. 

The premise:

60 pitches in 60 minutes. 4 judges – 3 from Charles River Ventures – me, Bill Tai and George Zachary and 1 celebrity guest judge – Matt Marshall from Venturebeat.   The first half of the contest took place in the Stanford MBA cafeteria – noisy, chaotic, and fun. 

Contestants wait their turn to pitch: 

The judges: me, Matt Marshall, George Zachary, and Bill Tai

The judging criteria: 

The judges scored each contestant from 1-100, with 400 being the highest possible score a contestant could earn.  The criteria? Because contestants only had 60 seconds, this wasn’t intended to be a business plan contest.  We were hoping this could be a fun, educational experience for the Stanford MBAs to learn how to communicate their ideas succinctly and persuasively in 60 seconds or less. 

There are some salient, real world reasons why being able to mount a convincing argument in 60 seconds or less can help you as an entrepreneur.  For example, we’ve received numerous business plan submissions in the first month since launching our CRV QuickStart seed financing program - it’s an imperative for the entrepreneur to make as strong of an impression as quickly as possible.  Or, you may find yourself on an elevator with Rupert Murdoch and want to convince him why he absolutely needs to acquire your startup if he has any hopes of properly monetizing all of the MySpace traffic.  Except, he’s getting off on the 6th floor, so you only have 40 seconds.  

In both cases, what the pitch represents is a means by which you can capture our imagination and make us want to learn more about your idea.  With the Entrepreneur Idol contest, we weren’t looking for fully baked or fundable ideas.  That’s incredibly difficult to convey in 60 seconds.  But the purpose of the 60 seconds is to get us salivating to hear more of what you have to say.  Were you authentic in your delivery? Did you come across as being credible?  Was your general target market attractive? Did you make a logical, persuasive argument?  Did you make us believe that you could be a great entrepreneur to back?

(Tip: Research your VCs before you pitch them.  People tend to fund things they are personally excited about.  It makes your job easier if you seek out people already immersed in your space.) 

 The results:

The judges chose 5 finalists based on the scores.  The top 3 got to present in front of an auditorium full of their peers.  In true American Idol style, each of the top 3 pitched, received feedback from each of the judges, and the audience chose the winner by clapping and making noise.  

The winners, Jeff, Rohin and Ned (left to right) – sorry the photo is blurry:

1st: Ned Tozun, MBA2 – Solid state LED for the developing world
2nd: Rohin Dhar, MBA2 – Online job recruitment services
3rd: Jeff Piper, MBA2 – Hedging instruments for residential real estate market
4th (tied): Vanessa Stanley-Miller, MBA2 – Kid-centric online video service
4th (tied): Ben Savage, MBA2 – Location based mobile game platform

Closing thoughts:

Based on student feedback, people had a lot of fun and it was very educational.  For them, it was illuminating to see the top 3 deliver their pitches in front of a big audience – they could learn from their peers and from the feedback we gave after each pitch.  Moving forward, I’d like to have all 5 finalists (and perhaps more) give their pitches in front of the larger audience.  The margin of difference between the top 9 scores was very small and most of the learning happens by watching other people pitch in real-time. 

We at CRV were very impressed by the quality of the pitches - by the delivery, the ideas themselves, and the enthusiasm of the contestants.

Statistics:

Clarification about CRV QuickStart

There’s been quite a bit of attention around our new QuickStart program – including this critical post from the O’Reilly Radar folks.   I posted the following comment to the thread because I thought that some of their  misinterpretation stems from the fact that O’Reilly & CRV haven’t had any personal, 1-on-1 discussions about the program – something I’m now trying to remedy. I can see why, from the vantage of an outsider reading the press that’s been written about the program, they might come to some of the conclusions they come to.

Also, check out the FAQ George Zachary posted to his blog.

Hi Tim & Bryce:

I read this post about our announcement with great interest and it struck me that you have certain impressions about us and our QuickStart program that may stem from the fact that the two of us (groups, firms) don’t know each other that well. So I wanted to take the opportunity to help clarify our position and try to illuminate where we’re coming from.

1. We aren’t abandoning our traditional early stage model.

-To characterize this as a ‘learning from Odeo’ is unfortunate and incomplete, because this program arose from genuine, organic interest from entrepreneurs we’ve been working with for awhile. People have been asking for seed stage convertible notes from us. 4 out of 5 of our most recent projects were seed stage convertible notes. 3 of these are in consumer services, the other is a semiconductor IP company. We formalized a program around activities we were already engaged in, so that these entrepreneurs would have a much more streamlined way to interact with us. Furthermore, we enjoy very early stage investing and want to spend time on these projects.

The thinking was, “Let’s not force all seed stage projects who fit a certain profile to go through a process that makes more sense for a traditional venture investment. Let’s put in a place a standard term sheet / deal structure so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we finance a project like this.”

-Ultimately, we are neutral as to whether or not we should do seed debt or equity. We feel that the final decision is up to the entrepreneur. We’ll gladly participate in a seed equity round if that’s what the entrepreneur deems best for his/her needs. We want to work with folks like OATV – I have a tremendous amount of respect for you guys. What we’re trying to do with this program is create some efficiency, transparency, and choices for the entrepreneur.

-Also, the fund we are currently investing out of is a $250 million fund. It’s a good size for doing both very early, seed stage projects as well as larger clean tech projects such as Celunol. It’s also a fund size that somewhat reduces our incentive to be solely focused on driving massive hits, although of course, we are happy to have hits. I don’t think being hits only focused is a good long term strategy in this business.

2. This doesn’t feel like a ’spray and pray’ approach to me – in terms of how I hear people internally speak about these seed projects. We’re doing these seed projects out of both coasts, averaging about 1-3 projects per year per investing professional. We’re still doing a decent amount of diligence and research into the seed projects we are investing in.

Btw, Bryce – yes, the west coast team is driving this program in terms of setting up the workflow, infrastructure, and processes, but our entire investing team is involved in making seed investments. Perhaps there was some confusion in messaging, but I assure you that nothing has changed internally. The last 4 seed investments we made were led by multiple people.

Having spent most of my life working hands on with developers in hardcore ‘alpha geek’ environments, I completely understand that most innovation doesn’t necessarily happen with ‘rockstar teams’ and ‘all-star angels’. In fact, most of my time is spent in the field, doing first hand research, hanging out with developers, going to user group meetings.

The reason why I’m excited about this new program is that I’m actively looking at virtual world, gaming, and next gen online socialization technologies. There’s some amount of title risk associated with these projects, because implicit in the design of the product are all of the creator’s assumptions about user behavior, emotional connection, and the sociological relationship between multiple users/groups. This investment size allows me to more palatably bear the risk of working with a couple of groups to develop a prototype and see how these assumptions manifest into the product/business. At the end of the day, I feel like I’ve personally failed if none of my seed investments flourish into viable Series A (B, etc) opportunities.

Thanks for reading my long post. I just wanted to share my perspective and try convince you that we are actually being a lot more thoughtful about this process than you seem to think we are.

Best,
Susan