New Wine 2.0 Competition Video

As promised, here's an embedded copy of the new video for the Wine 2.0 competition at Vator.tv.



We'll be doing our (last) push on asking folks to vote for this new promo in the next week or so before the end of the contest (interestingly, Vator.tv *just now* added a "Vote" button for the Wine 2.0 competition - which is apparently different from "rating" a video, so for anyone who has a moment to go vote for our pitch, we'd much appreciate it!

NoCal Report

We had an awesome trip (again) up to San Francisco and Napa.

Larry & I got the opportunity to do an interview with Bambi Francisco and the folks at Vator.tv (watch for it in the near future on the Vator.tv site), and also to have a great chat with Michael Stajer of WineCommune and JJ Buckley. We love getting to know more people in the wine industry as a whole, especially when it's someone who's worked hard to build his business over the last 8 years as Michael has. (We also love buying wines from them, and you should too!).

On the ride up, I attempted to finish editing, compositing and doing the audio work on our latest promo/pitch for our startup. The pitch is now up at Vator HERE, but I'm also going to embed it in it's own post following this one.

I can't say I ever tried editing on a laptop on a bumpy highway at 90 miles an hour. All I can say is that I can't really recommend it. It's hard. Here's a pic Larry snapped off on the way. I look happy in there, right?


I finished the piece as we pulled into the Vator TV shooting location at The Presidio, with the final render coming out at 2:53pm, our scheduled meeting time was 3:00, so we quickly changed shirts in the parking garage and boogeyed upstairs. (which, all we can say is *wow* - amazing architecture and offices there...)

It was great to meet and talk with Bambi, Roland, Meliza and Carl from the Vator team - thanks for making the interview a great experience!

We also took a few hours on Friday to check in with our friend over at Bacchus Caves, David Provost, who graciously took us to check out his companies latest masterpiece up in the hills of Napa. The work they've just completed at a private family's cave was just astounding and made us all that much more enthusiastic about our partnership with them.

Headed North

Another crazy week - we're busy doing the VC and angel dance, and are headed up to San Francisco and Napa this Thursday & Friday.

We're still at the top of the ratings heap on Vator.tv's Wine 2.0 competition and have actually been pulling further out ahead of the pack on ratings, making us the highest rated business pitch by almost double our nearest competitor with less than half of the number of viewings (and about a month and a half less viewing time).

We're also deep into cutting and creating a new video promo for the last week or so of the competition, complete with a couple of super secret sneak peeks at the interface for Vinocera, our RIA asset interaction application (it's way too cool to just call it an "asset management application").

Larry & I are also excited about a few of the meetings we have up north, some cool people doing groovy stuff. It's always a good thing to start business development early in the life of a company!

If anyone up in the Northern California area would be interested in meeting with us while we're up there at the end of this week, please drop us a line.

More video promo stuff coming

Today we got to shoot some more video footage for version 2.0 of our Vator.TV promo (and VC Road Show pitch, etc.) with the nice folks over at the Production Group (thank you Carol, Mark & Rick!) - here's a little snippet from behind the scenes.


Online Videos by Veoh.com

And we'll have 2.0 version up next week sometime hopefully with some spiffy compositing & graphics work done over the weekend (assuming I can figure out how to use Motion in a weekend. Yeah. Sure. No Problem..... *cough*).

How Do You Value Sweat Equity?

There's definitely two sides to what seems to be a bit of a loaded question.

Of course, people we're meeting with are bringing capital to the table, and it's valid to say that "well, you can't do this without our real dollars."

At the same time, it's safe to say that we (as a whole company, including our capital partners) "can't do this without our real work already invested."

Personally, I understand very clearly that there isn't a formula for a clearcut hours-to-dollars translation for the sweat equity we as founders have put into the gamble of entrepreneurship.

An investor of capital has in his or her best interest, maximizing the value of their real dollars.

Entrepreneurs have in their best interest, maximizing, or at the very least finding a fair value for their sweat equity.

There's a lot of things that we as Vino Veritas have been able to achieve by sweat equity. Several of those things we can point to right away and we know very well what those things would have cost if we hadn't done them ourselves (and thankfully had the skill sets to get them done on our own), but how do you value those things?

Do entrepreneurs count the real costs of keeping their families afloat during a startup before they start drawing salaries?

I'd love to hear from some investors and other entrepreneurs on how they've valued these intangibles in the past and what they think is fair.

Google (Half) Docs

I really like Google Docs - for early stage collaboration, it's been an outstanding tool for some months now on various projects, but there's a big downside to it being used as an Office (Or OpenOffice/NeoOffice such as we use these days) replacement with the current file size limitations.

A single document we were working on this week earlier had to be split into 6 separate Google Docs for collaboration on - a total pain in the behind. (A thumbdrive may have been more efficient in the end, but a lot of the collaborative data and text was coming from parallel web pages). Our current business plan master document is over 3mb not including financials, so a 5ookb file size limit just isn't going to cut it.

Oh well, there's always NeoOffice which frankly after many years of buying expensive MS Office products, the current open-source releases are actually good enough for Enterprise use.

Wine 2.0 Competition Update

Lots of thanks to all the folks who've supported what we're working on by checking out our video pitch over at Vator, Vino Veritas is now the highest rated pitch in the Wine 2.0 competition!

There's still a few weeks to go in the competition, so we'll see how the rest of the contest shakes out, but our closest rated competitor has been up a lot longer than we have and they have triple the views, but the same number of ratings. So on a vote-to-view ratio, we're kicking butt!

I want to take a minute to comment on some of the pitches over there and my favorites (besides our own, of course) because there are some great companies on there.

Crushpad's business is awesome and will only keep growing (their micro-competitor from ProVina's "Winepod", was recently capitalized by VantagePoint to the tune of $4m, as represented by WSGR - coincidentally, our legal counsel as well) - and with the booming custom-crush and small run vintage business, these micro-labels will be products that will dovetail very nicely with our premium cellaring services.

Just like a lot of the smaller run wineries, as these micro-labels start to get traction as great wines, there will be more and more wine enthusiasts who line up for these wines to pick them up at the moment they are released, and they're going to need to cellar those vintages so that they get the proper aging.

And hey, that's just what we'll be able to help out with!

I hope that maybe even some of our storage clients will make and release some of their small-run vintages exclusively to Vino Veritas members:)

The other great business that just popped up a few days ago with a pitch is WineCommune. Their auction site is an awesome place to find great wines and their growth the past few years has been phenomenal. Larry, our co-founder, has added substantially to his collection through their auctions (shhhh, don't tell his wife:).

They've also been around since 1999 and are a growth company as well.

These two companies are in very different places in the playing field of the current competition since the rest are all pretty much startups or not yet profitable.

There's also a number of social networks based around wines, which is cool, but personally I think social networks are over-hyped these days and there are only so many accounts and profiles we can all keep track of. I'd rather make sure our software has conduits for synching with other online databases, and then some FaceBook and MySpace widgets for showcasing wine collections, but unless our users tell us otherwise, I don't think we need to build yet-another-social-networking-application.

(Do any of you remember Friendster & Tribe? I think social networks are a bit transitory by nature...)

We're looking forward these last few weeks of the contest to see how it shapes up, so for those of you who haven't yet gone to view and vote, we'd love your support as well!

More on "Funding" Websites

Just while I have a minute this morning I want to elaborate on the comments of a day or so ago about these venture capital/angel investor websites that claim to give entrepreneurs access to capital providers.
I don't mean to pick on GoBigNetwork.com, but they seem to be the front and center of the for-profit/pay-for-access listings, so here's a few numbers to chew on:

• 53 - the number of "investors" listed in Southern California
• 23 - the number of investors that after fact-checking, seem to be at least somewhat legitimate capital sources
• 15 - the number of investors/companies that are asset backed or late-stage VC
• 8 - is the number of investors that are angel or seed funding (which is inevitably what just about everyone is looking for on these sites)

So if you're a startup entrepreneur, watching every dollar you're spending like a hawk - would you pay $200 for access to a list that is only 15% relevant?

We Are.

Just a quick note before I go to sleep, because unlike some other (possibly non-human) entrepreneurs, yes, I need sleep.

Awesome day to start out the morning at an LAVA breakfast, end up seated next to someone who literally works right next to another real estate professional I spent seven months doing a deal with (in a prior career life), their significant other whose family has a very relevant business to what we're doing (meeting to follow on Tuesday next week), then to follow with a wine tasting and HD TV kibbutzing this evening with some more friends who happen to include the wife (unbeknownst to me) of one an agent at a very small, other commercial real estate company we've been working with very closely.

The point of that was to say that it's awesome to run into a couple of people in one day in totally random circumstances who "have heard about you" and "oh yeah, aren't you the wine cave guys?"

Hell yes we are!

We're 65 days old, and we ARE.

Rock on.

Networking with a purpose

Much enjoyed LAVA's networking breakfast this morning. Not only meeting interesting people (whose response is pretty uniformly enthusiastic:), but learned some new stuff about blending equity and debt in a startup (pretty tough to do at the seed stage apparently, but there's loads and loads of loans and debt out there if you're already a going concern).

It's also interesting to look at debt from a corporate standpoint instead of from a personal standpoint and to assess the long-term costs of your equity deals against long-term costs from debt.

Also interesting to start learning just how many different kinds of debt there is out there. (Hint: it's a LOT) There's a good amount of it that just won't be right for us, but there are definitely some credit/debt facilities that may prove to have a much lower overall cost than comparable amounts of equity dollars.

All a part of the education.

The Capital Hunt

As we continue to have conversations with angels and other seed investors, and we continue to actively look for more folks to be having conversations (and hopefully term sheets with), I find it shameful that there are so many websites out there asking entrepreneurs to sign up and pay for access to "funding resources" or angels/capital groups.

I've been spending a bunch of time looking at these different websites and browsing their lists of limited information (you have to sign up if you want to contact the company or person on their list), and I cannot imagine a worse use of the limited capital any startup has on these sites.

As long as you have a company name, and maybe one or two more details, this is the day and age of being able to gauge the legitimacy of someone who may either fund your business, or just waste your time. A couple of great examples I found today on the "GoBigNetwork" listings of "Investors: Los Angeles:"

Investor

Company Name	latonya pleace
Location	los angeles, CA (USA)
Investor Type	Private Equity
Investment Amount	$25k to $75k
Funding Stages	Angel
Industries	Advertising
Geographical Focus	United States, Los Angeles Area
Accept Business Plans?	Yes
Investment Preferences	ONLY WITH INVESTOR THAT DEAL WITH REAL STATE PROPERTYS THAT WANTS TO MAKE MONEY AS A PPROFIT.

Oh yes, this is one we should definitely talk with.

Then there's this:

Investor:

	CaliforniaInvestmentNetwork.com
Location	Los Angeles, CA (USA)
Investor Type	Angel
Investment Amount	$100k to $2 Mil
Funding Stages	Angel
Industries
Geographical Focus	United States, Silicon Valley
Accept Business Plans?	No
Investment Preferences	Online California Investor Network seeks brief entrepreneur proposals for potential investments.

Oh, BUT WAIT, that's not an actual angels forum or even a financial advisers network, it's simply, you guessed it, another network that you pay $199 to for access to whoever is on THEIR investors list (Hey! Maybe they've got GoBigNetwork listed?!!!)

Give me a break.

I'm endlessly grateful for the personal introductions and referrals to legitimate places like LAVA.

Other entrepreneurs... don't waste your money on these sites, just cursory checks on the veracity or legitimacy of just a few of their listings by company name or persons names will tell you an awful lot about the quality (or lack thereof) of their listings.

Innovation vs. Invention

Everyone we talk to invariably responds with something along the lines of "that's a great idea," and we feel they're right. We've also already been getting calls from folks in other states either obviously interested in trying to figure us out and "rip off" our idea, or inquire about whether we've considered building in their state.

However, a great post over on TechDirt today draws a wonderful distinction between ideas, and the implementation of said ideas.

On this front, I'm profoundly happy that we are *not* an IP heavy company that's going to market with a bunch of patents (that may or may not be rightfully granted) that we're going to have to spend tons of legal dollars defending or suing other people for. That's not innovation in my book, that's extortion, and not a business I want to be in.

We're a company whose success is 100% based on our ability to successfully execute our concepts to the level of quality and detail that we have already set forth as our standard. The first step to executing a great idea is communicating it in a way that all the people that the project requires "get it."

We're there, and we're not just the next "great idea."

News, Links, etc.

Well, two days of work, and we're settled into the new offices, the network and phones are all happy and the noses are back to the grindstone, so to speak.

The most important part of the location? We're directly across from a Starbucks, AND a mexican place with margaritas (wait, aren't we *all* about wine?).

Also, we found out today that Vino Veritas took 2nd place in the Always-On "Clean Technology" competition over at Vator.tv.

Our pitch is also in the running for "Wine 2.0" competish, which closes on October 1, so all y'all following us get over to our pitch on Vator and cast your vote, comment or referral for us!

Here's a couple of quick pictures of the new digs (settled/functional, yes; settled/art on the walls etc., uh, not yet...):


The offices have windows! Yay! (and conveniently, they look directly towards a couple of sites we're considering) The one above is my office, Larry's is below, workin' hard.

Thanks to all our friends and families who continue to encourage and contribute their own enthusiasm (and even helped us move in to these new offices) for what we're up to over here!

Moving Day!

Right on, we've finally found a (workable) office and it's moving day! Furniture, etc. in today, networking etc. in tomorrow.

Moving furniture in the middle of a really hot day is always a good time, but we're stoked to have a place to put our office furniture!

More productivity to follow, etc.