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Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series

SECRETS TO THE SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PITCH: A VC PERSPECTIVE

Monday, March 1, 2010
6:30-8:30pm

Wells Fargo Room
Haas School of Business

Morgenthaler Ventures will lead a session designed to illustrate what is required to make a successful pitch to venture capitalists.

Come and learn the secrets of what makes a successful investor pitch! A diverse panel of early stage investors will give you their perspective on what they really need to see in a pitch in order to fund your company. There will be a brief presentation on the essential elements of an investor pitch, and then the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions of the panelists. The session is designed to be highly interactive and will allow you to ask questions about what really goes on as venture capitalists listen to a pitch. You will discover what the hidden agendas are in the questions they routinely ask of first time founders and their teams. We promise you will come away with a different perspective on venture capitalists, and a better understanding of how to deal with the process before, during, and after the pitch.

Morgenthaler Ventures has been in the venture capital business for more than 40 years, steadily investing through every market cycle. Throughout that time, we’ve had the good fortune to work with exceptional entrepreneurs to help build companies of value.

Among the many Morgenthaler-funded companies that have gone public or were acquired are: Apple, Atria, Brion, Illustra Technologies, IPC – The Hospitalist Company, Medaphis, Microchip, New Focus, NexTag, NEXTEL, Nuance Communications, Perclose, Premisys, Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals, Synopsys and VeriFone.

FEATURED SPEAKERS



Rebecca Lynn (MBA 08), Principal, Morgenthaler Ventures (Moderator)		Gary Little, Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures





Hank Plain, Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures		Aydin Senkut, Founder & President, Felicis Ventures

SPEAKER BIOS:

Rebecca Lynn (MBA 08), Principal, Morgenthaler Ventures (Moderator)
Rebecca joined Morgenthaler’s Menlo Park office in 2007, and she focuses on early-stage investments in Health2.0, financial services and mobile. She serves on the board of Lending Club and Practice Fusion, and she is a second on the boards of OpinMind and Autonet.

Rebecca began her career at Procter and Gamble’s corporate headquarters where she worked in international new product market entry. She spent time in both Cincinnati and Mexico City developing new products for the market and launching a new category in Latin America. She then joined NextCard as an early employee and spent four years at the company. At NextCard, she led product development efforts and later served as the Vice President of Marketing where she managed one of the top five largest online marketing efforts. NextCard was the first online credit card company, and it went public in 2000 with a $1.3B market cap. After NextCard, she ran her own consulting business focusing on online marketing for financial services and affiliate marketing.

Rebecca passed the California State Bar and has a focus on intellectual property litigation and corporate law. Rebecca is an inventor on several issued patents, and she was published in the Berkeley Law and Technology Journal.

Rebecca holds a B.S. from the University of Missouri in Chemical Engineering and a JD/MBA from the Haas School of Business and UC Berkeley School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.

Gary Little, Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures

Gary was named to the 2008 and 2009 Forbes Midas 100 lists honoring the most successful and influential people in venture capital. He focuses on Internet services and software investments. His investments include NexTag, Netli (acq. by Akamai), TimesTen (acq. by Oracle) and KnowledgeNet (acq. by Thompson). Gary currently serves on the boards of Rhythm NewMedia, JasperSoft, MuleSoft and Opinmind. He previously served on the board of imeem.

Gary joined Morgenthaler Ventures in 1997. Previously, he served in several roles at Apple Computer, including SVP of Apple's Power Macintosh Division, VP Sales Americas, and Sr. Dir of Marketing for Apple's Pacific division (China, Japan, Asia, Latin America, Canada).

Previously, Gary spent seven years at Sun Microsystems as Director of Product Marketing, Director of Asia Pacific Marketing (including a posting in Hong Kong), and as Group Manager of Industry Marketing. Before Sun, he held sales and marketing positions at IBM. Gary began his career as an IC design engineer for TRW's microelectronics research labs. Gary earned an MBA from Harvard University and a BSEE from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hank Plain, Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures

Hank joined Morgenthaler Ventures in 2007 after more than 25 years in the life science industry, including co-founding eight medical device start-ups and directing the exits of five companies with a combined value well in excess of $2 billion. He is based in Menlo Park, California and is focused on medical device investments.

Hank was on the board and a member of the deal committee that helped to successfully negotiate the acquisition of Acclarent by Johnson & Johnson for $785 million in December 2009.
Hank is the Vice Chairman of The Foundry, the premier medical device incubator based in Menlo Park, California, where he co-founded Ardian, Cabochon Aesthetics, ForSight Labs, ForSight Vision2, Miramar, Satiety and Transcend. He also served as President and CEO of Perclose, Inc. from 1993 to 2000, during which he led the company to $100 million in sales and managed the company’s successful IPO and acquisition in 1999 by Abbott Laboratories for $650 million. He was Chairman of Embolic Protection, where he helped negotiate the acquisition of the company in 2001 by Boston Scientific for $200 million. He also served as a Director at TransVascular until Medtronic acquired the company in 2003 for an undisclosed amount. Previously, Hank worked at Eli Lilly for 12 years in various management positions.

Hank holds a B.S. from the University of Missouri – Columbia in Finance.

Aydin Senkut, Founder & President, Felicis Ventures

Aydin Senkut is the Founder and President of Felicis Ventures. He's been an angel investor in promising start-ups since 2006. His portfolio encompasses over 50 companies including Appjet (acquired by Google), Aardvark, Brightroll, Bump Technologies, Disqus, Imageshack, Meraki, Mint (acquired by Intuit), Mixer Labs (acquired by Twitter), Mochi Media (acquired by Shanda Games), Outright, Posterous, Powerset (acquired by Microsoft), Plusmo (acquired by AT&T), Practice Fusion, RichRelevance, Sendori (acquired by IAC), Tapulous, and Yume Networks. His investment focus is on early stage consumer internet, mobile and enterprise web companies.

Prior to Felicis Ventures, Aydin was Google's first product manager responsible for launching Google's first 10 international sites and then first International Sales executive closing deals worth over $100 million in gross revenues. He holds a B.S. from Boston University with Honors, an M.B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Aydin is on the board of Imageshack Corp. and co-organizes the quarterly gathering of ex-Google founders and investors. He's been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Financial Times Germany, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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