Well, summer’s over and things have heated up quickly:
- Bay Area trip: I’ve established contact with three VCs and two recruiters out there and am working my way through various introductory emails/calls.
- An entrepreneur I met last spring in the Cleantech Open competition introduced me to the CEO of his parent company in Israel. This person was visiting Boston and was seeking to hire a general manager for the U.S. subsidiary of his measurement systems company. I spent a couple hours with him learning about his company and the role he was looking to fill. I ultimately decided not to pursue this opportunity due to the lack of a strong technology/product development component and also the relative maturity of the company and its commercial offerings.
- The founder of a startup I had several dealings with last spring contacted me with an intro to a friend seeking executive help for his wireless technology startup. It’s not yet clear what sort of help this person is looking for but hopefully we’ll connect this coming week and see if there is any fit.
- I received a contact out of the blue from a professor at a U.S. university with a novel semiconductor technology. He is seeking a business partner and found my profile on line. The technology looks very interesting and promising and I’m looking to speak with this gentleman this coming week.
- I got together with the former colleagues I had written about previously for more brainstorming. We focused in on three concepts. One relates closely to what one of the guys is currently working on and may lend itself to a spinout. The two other concepts are just at the “idea” stage and require further technical and market exploration. We established actions for the group and will meet again in two weeks.
- I met again with the service business entrepreneur I had written about previously. The purpose of this meeting was to share my feedback about his concept, to identify the primary challenges I saw, and to determine next steps. Our key next step is to seek out meetings with a few organizations that are involved in similar services to gain insight as to how they deal with the challenges we’ve identified.
As can be seen I’ve shifted a great deal of attention to exploring new startup possibilities as opposed to finding existing ones. That’s it for now, I’ll update things as they progress.