Here's pressure: You get six minutes to impress a room full of venture capitalists. If successful, you could get the funding to become the next Sergey Brin and realize your dream of building your own
company. Or you could walk away as an absolute nobody. Welcome to the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford University, birthplace of Google--the perfect backdrop for an event in which 50 nervous small-time
entrepreneurs try to woo a room full of skeptical VCs in the amount of time it takes to order a burger from McDonald's. Make no mistake: for those company founders hanging on by the skin of their
teeth, the stakes are high. Execute your pitch well, and you graduate to getting a full hour with a deep-pocketed VC. Execute poorly, and you may have to take a job at someone else's startup. But as
they (the media) say, now is the time to be pitching new Internet companies. The opportunity is there, and the VCs are listening. In the second quarter of 2006, venture capitalists pumped $6.73
billion into startups. That's equivalent to roughly half of online ad spending for 2005. More than one-third of that revenue came from VC firms in the Bay Area, which makes Silicon Valley the perfect
place to hold a pitch conference. Oh, and unlike the last Internet bubble, the talk is about more funding or getting acquired. No one's thinking about taking their company public.
Read the whole story at Forbes.com »
