Tens of thousands of executives, analysts, investors and entrepreneurs descend on SF whether invited to JP Morgan or not. While the crush of people navigating the narrow halls of the Westin St. Francis Hotel for the marquee companies and special speakers like Condoleezza Rice can be overwhelming, across the city in hotels and restaurants, countless other meetings took place in quieter venues away from the din. This is where the business of startups happens, where companies whose star has not risen high enough for JP Morgan to start wondering how to make money off it, quietly meet with investors to refresh the capitalization of private emerging and growth companies.
Ironically for those startups needing money the most, it is a pay-to-play game. If you have enough money, you hire an IR/PR firm to arrange as many meetings as possible at a hotel or restaurant as near the Westin as you can afford. If you have less money, there are several satellite conferences which charge several thousand dollars for the advantage of being listed in a program with hundreds of other companies, presenting to a room of investors and leveraging a one-on-one meeting scheduler to score several dozen investor meetings. If you have even less money, you attend as a delegate and hope you can get enough attention from investors just using that one-on-one meeting scheduler. And if you don’t have any money, it is probably better to wait until the din dies down and the bolus of bloviating has deflated a little and then tap that network you need to have.
As a regular participant in this ritual for almost a decade including presenting companies many times at OneMedForum and Biotech Showcase, the major satellite conferences, my take-home has been: you get what you put in and then a little something extra. You need to reach out to your network and scour the list of attendees looking for quality meetings that won’t waste your time or theirs. You need to reach out to them with your best pitch so they take the meeting and know why up front. You need to invite people you know to attend your talk to generate some buzz about your company and pack the room. And the little extra is the serendipity that you have opened the door to, the accidental encounter with an investor or strategic company that you were never on the radar of, but are a great fit with.
And one last lesson learned – just like you would never consider yourself done with one Venture Fund meeting, don’t think one investment conference will get you to your destination. You need to participate in many conferences just like you need to pitch to many investors, before you get the job done and find the right match.
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Dr. Weickert was this year’s co-Chair of the OneMedForum conference at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in San Francisco which featured 89 companies and over 700 registrants including his new company, Sonescence.