[C4.] Venture to Broaden Presentation of Live Performances In a bid to widen the audience for concerts and live events, America Online and XM Satellite Radio are backing a venture that will deliver live performances to Internet, satellite and wireless customers and through other media.
VC and former entrepreneur Max Niederhofer of Atlas Venture gave a great presentation on how online games are already big and only going to get bigger, especially in the casual games via the browser.
An overhaul of teacher training in the subject is also vital; if new entrants to the profession are not encouraged to venture beyond spreadsheets and presentations, then progress is likely to be slow.
Students must own more than 50% of each venture and handle the presentations.
Groups can apportion the labor of screening applications, inviting the authors of promising ventures to make presentations, checking out the entrepreneur's claims through due diligence and negotiating investment terms.
Diana H. Frazier, a managing partner of Flag Capital Management, a limited partnership, who mediated the limited partner presentation at the venture capital association meeting, estimated that from 1986 to 2002, only 32 firms accounted for 56percentt of money distributed.
Now they are turning, without changing their pitching styles or presentation decks, to venture capitalists.
Vinod Khosla, the billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist, once gave a presentation about making coal obsolete, and in a paper entitled "The War on Coal" he wrote: "Unfortunately, coal-fired power plants are our most destructive and dangerous ones".
Many venture capitalists who attended those presentations felt that Microsoft was in effect redlining the computer industry, telling its competitors where they had opportunities and where they would be limited by Microsoft competition.
In the autumn of 2008 Sequoia Capital, a big venture-capital firm, produced a presentation for the companies in which it had invested that included a slide with a picture of a gravestone.
