Entrepreneurs
Attend Fair for Shot at Venture Capital
When Kenneth Lopez decided to abandon a law
career and start a computer animation firm to create visual displays
for court cases, he didn't even know what venture capital was.
Now the Widener University Law School graduate is
hoping that the investor contacts he made at an entrepreneurial fair
in Rockland on Tuesday will pay off-literally.
"It's like any good entrepreneur. You learn
the business of business," said the present and chief executive
of Animators at Law, the start-up Alexandria, Va., firm.
His company was among 38 vying for the attention
of 60 to 80 venture capitalists with between $8 billion and $10 billion
in start-up funding in one of the largest such gatherings on the East
Coast.
The Early Stage East '98 fair - sponsored by the
Delaware Entrepreneurs Forum, the American Stock Exchange and Arthur
Andersen & Co. -was designed to to bring together cash-starved small
start-up companies in the early stages of development with investors
looking for opportunities to get in on the ground floor of future success
stories.
The fair is intended for early-stage businesses,
companies that have not received investor funding, even if they also
qualify for bank loans.
Similar forums have been held in Delaware before,
but Tuesday's event at the DuPont Country Club marked a significant
departure and a new direction for the event (previously called the Delaware
Entrepreneurs Forum Venture Fair). In the past, the gathering focused
solely on Delaware and surrounding areas, with only 10 venture capitalists
present with $500 million in available fundings.
The new fair seeks to draw companies and venture
capitalists from a much larger area, to showcase the region and demonstrate
that the mid-Atlantic, and especially Delaware, can be a hotbed for
the kind of entrepreneurial efforts often associated with technology
corridors in California, Texas and New England.
More than 11 states were represented, from North
Carolina to Massachusetts, and even Iowa and Indiana.
"This is really a superb opportunity to bring
the best of the best companies into Delaware," said David J. Freschman,
chairman of the fir and present of the Delaware Innovation Fund in Wilmington,
a 3-year-old, $10 million seed fund.
Indeed, only two of the 24 companies that gave presentations
to investors actually were from Delaware: Epotec Inc., a Wilmington
start-up that is developing an online behavioral therapy program for
corporations similar to an employee assistance program, and Aquatic
Designs of Bethany Beach, which sells a laminated polypropylene material
to outdoor sportswear companies that is waterproof, breathable, soft
and capable of being stretched in four directions.
Another Delaware company, OBOS Inc. of Talleyville,
had a separate display to promote its desktop machine that transmits
hand-written orders and payments from salespeople in the field to a
central processing site.
"By bringing the venture community to Delaware,
it shows that this is a good investment climate," said Curt Baker,
chief financial officer of OBOS. "It shows that there are some
really interesting things happening in this state."
Several venture capitalists noted that Delaware
is most often thought of as a home or place of incorporation for major
Fortune 500 companies, not an incubator for entrepreneurship. As a result,
many also saw the event as an opportunity to put the economic development
efforts and success of Delaware on display for the 350 representatives
of companies and venture capitalists from out-of-state.
Other companies attending the fair ranged
from Homes For Living Inc., a 5 month-old Chadds Ford, Pa., direct-sales
company specializing in decorative candles, to Blackboard Inc., a Washington
provider of virtual classroom software for schools and corporations.
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
Privacy
| Legal
©1995-2003 Animators at Law, Inc. All Rights Reserved
|
| |
|
Animators at Law
National Headquarters
814 King Street
Alexandria, Virginia 22314
800.337.7697
|
