Venture Finance SIG: Want to Pitch your SaaS product/services?

6:30 PM - 8:30 PM November 19, 2008
DLA Piper
2000 University Avenue
East Palo Alto,, CA

Topic: Want to Pitch your SaaS product/services offering to the VC’s and the audience?

How to present? Email your executive summary and/or ppt by no later than Nov 15th to VentureFinanceSIG@sdforum.org. Approximately 3 presenters will be given the opportunity to make 5 minute product/service presentations (followed by 5 minute Q & A) to the VCs and the audience community. Early submissions are preferred.


Presentation Overview

While much of the attention has been on the consumer internet and social media, there has been a steady resurgence of entrepreneurial ventures targeting the enterprise. One of the key trends is the continued delivery of application and infrastructure software as a service. For example, at the application layer, in addition to the continued launch of SaaS applications targeting various verticals and horizontal areas within companies, we are seeing the emergence of “Enterprise 2.0” companies that use techniques from social networking and other consumer oriented internet applications to enable more spontaneous, knowledge based collaboration within the enterprise. Meanwhile, innovation continues at the infrastructure layer as well. We have begun to see the emergence of “cloud computing” and “platform-as-a-service (PaaS)” offerings, which allow developers to create and deploy Web applications via the cloud which users can then access from anywhere. This is a tremendous benefit for today’s IT department, eliminating such hassles as setting up and maintaining servers, databases, storage, and networks. Amazon's EC2, S3, and SimpleDB services, Salesforce.com, Joyent, and Google’s App Engine are all making noise in this space, while smaller companies such as Bungee Labs, are seizing on the concept of providing complete cloud-based development and deployment platform services.

VC’s believe a wave of new companies can create value delivering such services to companies, leading to a new rise of vendors and potentially the fall of some previous-generation leaders. But what are the necessary ingredients for tomorrow’s best services and how do VC’s evaluate them? We've learned from the past that while there are lots of ideas, many of them are not good candidates for VC funding…and for those that are strong candidates, not all of them secure funding. How do today's VC's pick tomorrow's winners among the dozens of innovative ideas they see each week?

Join leading technology venture capital firms, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Morgenthaler Ventures on Wednesday, November 19th, as they host an informative session that will showcase a sampling of companies targeting this space, and describe what they look for when evaluating new products for the enterprise. Attendees will observe select entrepreneurs as they pitch the ideas for their products and services to the VC's. These entrepreneurs, as well as the attendees, will benefit from real-time feedback during this interactive session. The VC's will then respond to questions from the audience followed by networking time.

Presenters
- Jim Lussier, General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners
- Ken Gullicksen, Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures

Moderator
- Shai Goldman, Director, SVB Capital

Event Logistics

Location

DLA Piper LLP
2000 University Ave.(University Circle)
East Palo Alto, CA 94303
Tel: 650.833.2000
Note: These are the tall buildings on the corner of University Avenue and Woodland Avenue on the west side of Hwy. 101. They are in the University Circle complex.

Directions

Agenda
6:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Registration / Networking / Refreshments
7:00p.m.-8:30 p.m. Panel discussion and Pitch Session (starts promptly at 7:00pm)

Price
$20 SDForum members
$30 Non-SDForum members