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Pump Up Your PowerPoint Presentations

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Twenty years ago, the ritual of the corporate presentation underwent a revolution: PowerPoint. Since 1987, this Microsoft program has been lampooned by everyone from Dilbert to The New Yorker. It’s been decried as evil by Yale professor Edward Tufte, in his famous screed, “PowerPoint is Evil,” published in Wired. It’s even been banned in some corners of corporate America, as Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, did back in 1997. Despite its Rodney Dangerfield-like reputation that it gets no respect, PowerPoint at the same time has become all but synonymous with the word “presentation.” Love it or hate it, nowadays very few people would even consider getting up in front of a room without it. Even Al Gore doesn’t leave the house without his .ppt docs. “If you went back to 1987 you’d find it’s essentially the same program with that slide sorter view. Each version since has just added extra stuff on top. After 20 years of PowerPoint, people are ready for a change,” says Cliff Atkinson, author of “Beyond Bullet Points,” published by Microsoft Press. Countless executives who groan at the mere mention of PowerPoint would agree: it’s time to pump things up.  Primarily, there are two ways to do it. Take a more creative approach in designing your PowerPoint presentations. That, and investigate some of the newer technologies and applications that integrate with PowerPoint to create a richer, more multimedia experience with your audience. Bullet points and boilerplate templates are so-o-o 1997 As his book title would suggest, Atkinson is not a fan of the overused and abused bullet point format and he’s an expert definitely worth listening to on the subject. Atkinson produced the courtroom PowerPoint presentation for the attorneys of the winning plaintiffs in the famous $253 million Vioxx judgment against Merck. Fortune magazine at the time credited his PowerPoint as instrumental in winning the case describing it as “frighteningly powerful.” Here are some of the ways Atkinson suggests in taking a different approach. (He’ll have to forgive our format here). Simplify, simplify, simplify. Too much information on the screen is perhaps the biggest mistake made in PowerPoint. Atkinson recommends having only one thought written like a newspaper headline or in a short sentence per slide. Set the mood and tone. Does your presentation come with a sense of urgency or excitement about a new strategy or product, problem-solving, pioneering a new direction or the tone of a very formal briefing? Pick a color palette that will help set that tone. Make sure you don’t stray from the palette with a color that doesn’t match. Make key slides stand out with a specific color from the palette. Don’t use that color with the other slides. Weave content into a narrative. Storytelling is a format that hooks in everyone. Like a good story, develop your presentation with a setting, a conflict, the characters involved, and what’s at stake. Think of the details in terms of “Acts” letting them unfold in a way that builds up to the solution that comes at the end. Storyboard on paper first. That’s right: low tech, before high tech. Atkinson contends it’s often easier to conceptualize on paper, rather than on a computer screen. Put pencil to paper first, and then use that as a guide in designing your slides. Make it human. “A presentation should be a conversation. Incorporate interactivity. The media should be transparent and not distract from you,” says Atkinson. One other tip: when you’re saying your most key thought, cut the PowerPoint to black. It will jar every set of eyes in the room away from the screen and force them to focus on you. Gear up While PowerPoint hasn’t changed much over the years, new technologies that integrate with it have. Here are a few that can help make your presentations more engaging: Audience response systems. A number of vendors, such as Turning Point, sell or rent equipment that enables you to give all the audience members a keypad. You can poll the audience in real time with their answers aggregating into bar graphs, pie charts, etc. right into your PowerPoint. Try a game show format. This is especially effective in training presentations. And again, there are numerous vendors to choose from who offer a combination of software and audience response gear to turn your presentation into a high energy quiz show format with the audience. Learning Ware is one such company offering a software package called GameShow Pro 4. Additionally, they offer ring-in pads for participating audience members to hit just like contestants on Jeopardy. Slicker production value. Presentation Pro offers a number of PowerPoint-compatible solutions to make your presentations more eye-catching, including studio quality graphics and 3D transitions, software to incorporate video and sound and even a program to capture mouse movements to replay for demo purposes.

A Better Way to Surf?

For several years now, computer users have had essentially one choice for navigating the Web: Internet Explorer. Despite persistent complaints about the software’s security flaws, Microsoft’s browser has enjoyed almost 100% market share. Enter Mozilla Firefox. Since its release last November, the open-source browser has been downloaded more than 25 million times and is well on its way to grabbing 10% of the market. Available through the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which provides open-source software coded by legions of volunteer programmers, the Firefox browser offers a host of innovations, including a built-in pop-up ad blocker, tabbed browsing so users can open more than one window at a time, and a search function that seeks out a word as you type it. The program runs on both PCs and Macs, and best of all, it is free. Simply download it at mozilla.org, and you’re ready to go. Casual Web surfers and hard-core techies alike have been quick to sing Firefox’s praises, and a number of universities, including Penn State, MIT, and Yale, have begun to deploy it. But should business owners make the switch? The main reason Firefox has taken off — besides widespread anti-Microsoft sentiment — is the belief that it offers a better defense against all those malicious programs out there in cyberland. Here’s why: Internet Explorer is tightly woven into the Microsoft Windows operating system. That makes it more convenient to use in conjunction with other Microsoft programs like Word and Outlook. On the other hand, spyware, malware, and viruses are rampant across the digital spectrum, and the most popular points of entry are Internet Explorer and Outlook. Should one of those programs become infected, it doesn’t take long for the virus to spread to your entire operating system. Secunia, a Danish security firm, for example, lists more than 20 unpatched vulnerabilities in IE 6.0. Firefox sits on top of, rather than inside, a computer’s operating system, which makes it less vulnerable. But it’s not iron-clad. Already the Mozilla Foundation has reported and patched nine vulnerabilities, including a JavaScript attack capable of stealing private data and another that could illicitly copy clipboard contents. Dean Mercado, an entrepreneur based in Holtsville, N.Y., recently installed Firefox on computers in his two businesses, the Fruitful Management Corp., a consulting firm, and Rio Enterprises, which markets pet-care products. Mercado had heard the buzz and figured he’d test-drive Firefox for consulting clients. His verdict: Firefox is indeed more secure than Internet Explorer. “Because the program is so new, Firefox is less of a target than Explorer,” says Mercado. “And since it’s open source, a lot of smart people are coming up with interesting extensions” — for example, a dictionary feature that defines a word when you click on it. There are drawbacks. While all websites work with Explorer, some do not work with Firefox. Instead, when a Firefox browser comes to visit, text and images are rendered as gobbledygook on the user’s screen. That’s likely to change as Firefox’s growing popularity encourages developers to recode their sites. Until then, it’s probably a good idea to keep two browsers ready. Firefox might be especially attractive if you run older versions of Windows, such as Windows 98 or 2000. That’s because Microsoft does not secure its older systems, instead preferring that consumers upgrade to its latest operating system, XP, which costs $99 and for which Microsoft recently released a security patch. But security isn’t everything. “I love the interface,” says Ramon Ray, owner of Smallbiztechnology.com, a consulting firm. “Firefox is easier and more efficient than IE. If your employees spend a lot of time on the Web, you should consider Firefox.”

Inside an Internet Incubator

To the founders of start-up dot-com Veritas Medicine, joining an incubator looked like a quick, simple, creative way to get seed money and get hatched. Who knew? There are maybe a dozen white Chinese-takeout cartons arranged in a neat rectangle on a conference table on the fourth floor of 840 Memorial Drive, but Robert Adelman dips into only two and places a few spicy string beans and a slice of white-meat chicken on his plate. The dinner meeting he’s attending in the offices of a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Mass., is an important one: it’s a chance to introduce an angel investor to Adelman’s Internet health-care start-up. Adelman can’t risk the brain drain that comes with a loaded stomach. Besides, he wants to keep his hands free to gesticulate as he maps out how his company, Veritas Medicine, will be the first in the world to match patients who have serious illnesses with the clinical trials that pharmaceutical companies run, while it ensures complete confidentiality on both sides. “We’ve been to Merck and Pfizer and go back to Merck on Friday,” Adelman says excitedly to the angel as he ticks off some of the behemoths that Veritas plans to take on not just as partners who will provide the trial information but also as the eventual source of the company’s revenues. “And we’re seeing Spicehandler at the end of March.” “Spicehandler. I can’t believe it,” says the angel, his eyebrows rising appreciably pateward as he picks string beans out of the carton with his fingers. “Spicehandler won’t talk to us.” Emboldened by the angel’s admiration for his clout (after all, he did arrange to get in the door of the president of Schering-Plough’s research-and-development arm), Adelman, 36, launches into the financing history of his barely four-month-old company: Stephen Knight, a pharmaceutical executive, came up with the idea for the business but wasn’t prepared to leave his job. So he sought funding from two venture capitalists in hopes of putting enough money into the company’s coffers to enable Adelman, a former orthopedic surgeon who was consulting in New York City, to run the show. When one of the VCs turned Knight down, he brought the idea to Cambridge Incubator. By early September, Knight had signed a deal to join the new incubator. The terms: for $834,000 in seed money and membership in the incubator, Knight handed over 51.22% of his company. The room goes silent. The angel’s long, full face gets less full and much longer, as if his cheeks have dropped into his jaw. “This is Cambridge Incubator that did this?” he asks. “This has to get fixed.” He shakes his head, trying to fathom what anyone — even the best-connected VC — could give a company that would be worth such a huge equity stake. “How can you keep people excited if as you build value you hear a sucking sound?” he demands. He looks Adelman straight in the eye. “You understand that you guys are on a very clear path to going public owning only your shorts.” When it’s time to market that matters most, the extra heat of an incubator can be a lifesaver. Internet incubators — a for-profit variant of the old-time government- or academic-supported not-for-profit entities — are sprouting up like dandelions in summer. Bill Gross’s Pasadena-based Idealab perhaps begat the trend in 1996. But it wasn’t until late last year that the dot-com-incubator spores really began to fly. The number of Internet incubators in the United States jumped from 15 in October 1999 to more than 50 in February 2000, according to Edward Black, a senior vice-president at the Aberdeen Group, who recently prepared a report on the subject. “It’s an emerging market in and of itself,” he says. The Internet-incubator concept is a simple one: typically, the incubators promise to take dot-com start-ups that are little more than an idea and give them a home (often a common one, where cross communication can flourish), business advice, connections to financing and high-level personnel, management and infrastructure services, and some capital. The last, the incubator founders say, is a primary reason for their being: to provide start-ups with seed capital. VCs, they say, can dole out only large chunks of money, because they don’t have the people power to be represented on numerous companies’ boards at once. Enter the incubators: purveyors of the $250,000 to $1 million or so that start-ups need to get going. In return for the incubators’ contributions, member companies turn over a hunk of equity: anywhere from 5% to more than 70%, reports Black, depending on the services and the funding provided. It’s hard to pinpoint a typical amount, but of the 11 incubators in Black’s study that disclosed an equity-stake range, 10 had ranges that started between 5% and 30%. The incubators like to speak of themselves as “accelerators” — hot boxes where companies can rocket from idea to launch in just 90 to 180 days. In a space where time to market can mean the difference between being an eBay.com and an Auctionharbor.com (who?), the extra heat can be a lifesaver. “The metaphor is an Indy pit stop,” says Mohanbir Sawhney, professor of electronic commerce at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill. “The car comes in, and — bang, bang, bang — 20 guys work on it, and they’re off in 30 seconds.” Of course, within that general framework lie wildly divergent business models. Some of the for-profit incubators, like Cambridge Incubator, charge for everything from management services to Web design to the Mountain Dew in the communal fridge, take a 50% or greater equity stake, and expect member companies to be with them for about 12 months. Others, like the San Francisco­based Camp Six, provide everything — even office space — free, take a 20% to 30% stake, and project a 3- to 6-month incubation period. And the business-building experience of the incubator founders swings just as wide. At one end of the spectrum is Bill Gross, 41, who founded three successful high-tech companies before he started Idealab, which has spawned such public companies as eToys Inc. (valued at more than $7 billion after its initial public offering, in May 1999). At the other end is Michael Stern, 20, a political-science major at Yale who’s cofounder of Aquarium Ventures, on the university’s campus in New Haven, Conn. With such a wide range of models — and no track record to speak of — the new for-profit incubators (many of which, like Idealab, plan one day to go public themselves) present today’s cash-strapped, time-pressed dot-com entrepreneurs with a seductive but difficult question: Is incubating my company worth it? On the evening of February 9, over spicy string beans and lemon chicken, Veritas Medicine’s Robert Adelman was just beginning to learn the answer. For the next six weeks, Inc. would be with him nearly every step of the way. Joining the incubator had seemed like a good idea at the time. It was late August 1999, and Veritas Medicine was no more than an idea in Stephen Knight’s head and a handful of slides. Knight, then 39, had just agreed to become the new president of Epix Medical Inc., and his wife had just had their second daughter. He knew that if Veritas were to see the light of day, he’d have to find someone else to lead the venture and enough money to enable that person to operate. Knight had no trouble lining up the first: Robert Adelman, a friend of his from Yale Medical School, was looking for a change and owed him a favor. As cofounder of the successful biotechnology company Operon Technologies Inc., in Alameda, Calif., Adelman had not just business experience but the savings that would allow him to work without a paycheck for a while. He came on board as Veritas’s acting CEO. Knight was in search of the funding he needed when he met Andrew Olmsted, head of development for Cambridge Incubator (CI), one evening at his health club. Olmsted suggested that Knight drop by and give the incubator’s CEO, Timothy Rowe, the Veritas pitch. “It was kind of a last-ditch effort,” says Knight. The deal that Knight struck with CI — the incubator’s first — was not ideal. After all, Knight did give up what would amount to 51.22% — when fully diluted — of the company. (That stake was split between Cambridge Incubator and SeaFlower Ventures. SeaFlower was brought into the deal, says Knight, because one of its partners, James Sherblom, is a former biotech executive whom Rowe went to for advice because Rowe knew little about health care.) Still, the deal turned what had been an entrepreneurial dream into an operating company with $834,000 in seed funding, office space, a technology infrastructure, and the ability to hire the beginnings of a staff. Knight’s idea for an Internet company was straightforward: Pharmaceutical companies constantly run clinical trials of the new drugs they’re developing, but the locations (and other details) of those trials are often secret, for competitive reasons. Many patients want to participate in the trials but don’t know how to find them. What if someone were to compile a comprehensive Web-based database of trial sites for, say, 40 life-altering diseases, along with crucial medical information? Then patients could enroll in the trials at will, and the pharmaceutical companies, which would fill up their trials faster, could save millions of dollars by getting their drugs to market sooner. It would be a win-win scenario. Tim Rowe certainly thought so. “Pharmaceutical companies have lots of drugs, and there are lots of pharmaceutical companies,” says Rowe, 32, recounting his reaction to Knight’s pitch. “You get very, very big numbers when you multiply them.” At the heart of Rowe’s Cambridge Incubator — the place where he expected Veritas and about 14 other start-ups to spend some 12 months — is the “venture campus.” At the time Adelman came on board, that 18,000-square-foot biometrically secured (it uses fingerprint scanning) enclave was under construction in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Boasting a cafÉ, a stage area, and 14 open company bays that accommodate five to seven people each, the space was designed to be, Rowe says, a veritable petri dish of cross communication. He was particularly excited about the translucent, corrugated-polycarbonate walls that he said would surround the bays, allowing company owners to get a sense of the activity within the offices. They’re intended to encourage collaboration but keep from view the contents of the companies’ all-important whiteboards. Companies within the incubator, Rowe explains, will go from mature concept to prototype or product within 120 days. In addition to “active incubation” services (VC contacts, mentoring, and management services), CI provides some $250,000 to $1 million in seed capital to each of its incubated companies. Rowe is financing the incubator with $10 million he raised from the venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and the Boston Consulting Group, where he was a management consultant for four years. (His father, Richard Rowe, who sits on CI’s board of directors, lent him $500,000 to start the project.) CI has advertised since November that it plans to raise $100 million more, but at press time none of that money had come in. Until the venture campus was completed, on March 31, Veritas Medicine was housed, along with CI and its three other member companies, in bland office space across the street. Veritas’s 12 employees were socked away in three offices with gray melamine desks. There was generally a collection of crushed Mountain Dew cans and a box of shirts from the cleaner’s on the filing cabinet next to Adelman’s desk, and a stack of empty pizza boxes atop the trash can in the entrance area. “One of the stipulations of my joining the incubator,” says Adelman, jiggling the brown loafer off his foot, “was that they’d provide seven or eight cases of Mountain Dew a week.” Adelman, who has light brown hair that he slicks back for important meetings, wears rumpled beige khakis and moves with a gangly, nervous energy. Along with Joshua Schultz, 25, Veritas’s vice-president of business development, he honed Knight’s rough idea into a solid business model. Included in the model is the company’s goal for earning revenues: the pharmaceutical companies will likely pay Veritas a “percentage of value created,” that is, calculate the savings they’ve accrued by filling their trials so quickly and give Veritas a percentage of those savings. Another refinement is its so-called switchboard structure. It’s that structure that places Veritas so neatly, and so objectively, between the two markets that it serves. (Schultz had become familiar with the progenitor of the switchboard model when he worked at the Boston-based management-consulting group Corporate Decisions Inc.) Two outgrowths of the concept are an encrypted database that will store the trial information and automatically match patients and trials; and the idea of distributing the service not just through Veritas’s own Web site but through windows and other links placed on various health-care sites. Both Adelman and Schultz have no question that without Cambridge Incubator, Veritas would be weeks or maybe months behind where it is now. From day one not only have they had office space and furniture, phones, a T1 line, and a computer network, but they’ve had access to virtually all the professional services any good dot-com start-up needs to get going: Web developers, lawyers, public-relations and marketing specialists, and recruitment and human-resources help. Using CI developers, they’ve built their Web prototype for $20,000, as opposed to the $50,000 that it would have cost if they’d used outside help. CI has also been useful, Adelman and Schultz say, in helping them know what VCs want to hear and in providing VC contacts, including DFJ, in Redwood City, Calif.; and Polaris Venture Partners, Advanced Technology Ventures, and Atlas Venture, all in the Boston area. And CI has led them to an important health-care adviser, Dr. Hamilton Moses III, a partner of Boston Consulting Group who is based in Washington, D.C. Taken together, those ingredients have helped jump-start the company. “In this world,” says Adelman, “a week or a month can be the difference between life and death.” From the outside, the incubator appeared to have all the makings of a digital-age Camelot. But Adelman soon discovered that all was not well inside the Internet-incubator world. For starters, there is a question about the nature of CI’s contribution to Veritas: Is it simply an incubator, providing the environment in which the independent company can grow? Or is it actually a cofounder? When asked that question, Tim Rowe says that CI came up with Veritas’s distribution strategy; he uses that as an example of how CI acted as the company’s cofounder. That cofounder status, he says, justifies the incubator’s large equity stake in its member companies. (Rowe also repeatedly cites as justification for the large cut the Investment Company Act of 1940, an arcane federal law that implies that when a company goes public, it must maintain at least a 25.1% stake in the majority of the companies it has taken an interest in.) “Giving away equity in your business implies that you’ve got something that’s yours to start with, and that you’re giving it to somebody,” says Rowe. “In fact, what we’re doing is cofounding a business that didn’t exist.” Adelman, who is working toward owning 11% of that business, and Schultz, who owns 4%, have — to put it mildly — a different take on the matter. While they say they appreciate Rowe’s brainstorming with them to refine Veritas’s business model, in no way do they view him — or anyone at CI — as a cofounder of their company. “A cofounder is someone who is central to the origin of the concept,” says Adelman, ticking off himself, Schultz, Knight, and Knight’s wife, Elizabeth Quattrocki Knight, as Veritas’s cofounders. And the distribution strategy, he says, has for a few years been a standard one on the Web. And then there are the price tags attached to many of the benefits. Above and beyond the equity stake that CI took at the outset, Veritas has had to pay as much as $19,000 a month for the incubator’s infrastructure and the aforementioned professional services. Moreover, the recruiting function of CI has been so dismal that Veritas has gotten nearly all its staff itself, through Monster.com. And it used an outside graphics house to design its Web pages. Rowe acknowledges that the incubator’s recruiting services in February and March were below par. “I would say, without reservation, that at that time we were not providing enough recruiting support for Veritas,” he says. Aberdeen researcher Edward Black has this to say about the fee-for-service, pay-for-infrastructure Internet-incubator model: “It’s an interesting scenario. I give you this money, and basically, over the next six months, you’re going to give it all back to me in fees. You’ve got to love America.” To be fair, even at a rate of $19,000 a month, it would take Veritas some 44 months to give CI and SeaFlower their investment back in fees. Still, Black has a point — one that’s echoed by Edward B. Roberts, a professor of management of technology at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. “If you’re paying for all the services rendered on an as-you-go basis, then you are not partners,” he says flatly. “You’ve got a service contract, and you’ve given away ownership merely for the capital.” As Roberts sees it, incubated companies should pay for rent and for those services that vary from company to company, such as telephone calls and photocopying. But the in-house help and hand-holding, he says, should be factored into the equity stake. “You don’t pay a venture capitalist for advice,” he points out. That’s true. Even though every deal in the VC world is unique, VCs that do early-stage financing (Zero Stage Capital, in Cambridge, Mass., and Timberline Venture Partners, in Vancouver, Wash., for example) generally take a one-third equity stake in the companies they’re investing in and provide on the order of $500,000 in seed capital. Advice, mentoring, and access to management-level players are free. VCs that do mid- and late-stage financing provide their advisory and mentoring services at no charge as well. “If you know where you’re going and it’s speed you need, that’s where incubators can help,” says e-commerce professor Mohanbir Sawhney. For his part, Tim Rowe says that CI charges for high-level services because it’s difficult to allocate limited personnel resources. “The reason we bill is to provide an incentive for our member companies to be efficient about the amount of service they use,” he says. Rowe, who wrote the business plan for his father’s $308-million Internet company, RoweCom, while he was an M.B.A. student, doesn’t charge for his own advice. Neither do CI’s four other top executives, only one of whom has experience founding a dot-com himself and none of whom is older than 36. CI also has a five-member board of directors, but, Adelman says, “I haven’t had too much interaction with them. I met Dick Rowe at a party. And I met Phil Villers [cofounder of Computervision] a couple of times, just to say hello.” MIT’s Roberts points out, “One of the things an incubator owes to the companies that it’s incubating is some reality and the presence of the people who are advising.” Rowe acknowledges that “Veritas doesn’t interact directly with CI’s board.” Then he says: “Typically, what CI’s board does is, it designates one board member to each member company. But since none of our board members had medical knowledge, Phil Villers nominated [SeaFlower's] Jim [Sherblom] to act in that role.” He adds, “I don’t think his involvement is very deep.” Adelman, on the other hand, says that he has regular contact, probably every two weeks, with Sherblom, who, he says, is “a really knowledgeable guy in the pharmaceutical industry.” Contact between Adelman and the principals of other member companies appears to be minimal, too. When asked about idea swapping, which is one of the professed reasons all the nascent companies are housed in the same space, he responds, “Socially, it’s great.” Then he says: “There’s lots of small flow back and forth. It’s usually off-the-cuff.” Maybe part of the problem was that for Veritas’s first four and a half months, everyone was still operating behind closed doors and not within the translucent polycarbonate walls of Rowe’s $2-million haven across the street. As far as the VC contacts that CI has provided go, so far none has translated into financing. The VC that looks the most promising to date, says Adelman, is a prominent investor on the West Coast that focuses on health care. Veritas made the contact with the investor itself, through Seth Birnbaum, a coworker of the angel who hosted the Chinese-food spread on February 9. All together, has Cambridge Incubator truly acted as an “accelerator,” helping Veritas sharpen its direction and speeding its time to market? For that matter, can any incubator truly act as an accelerator? “My sense is that incubators do the speed part better,” says Kellogg’s Sawhney. “If you don’t know where you’re going, if you run like hell, that doesn’t help you. If you know where you’re going and it’s speed you need, that’s where incubators can help.” But even if you know where you’re going, is it worth it to give up a big piece of your company to get there, say, two, three, or even six months faster? “We won’t know the answer to that for three to five years,” says Andy Sack, 33, cofounder of the Internet companies Abuzz Technologies and Firefly. Sack is listed as an adviser at CI, but it’s difficult to see how much direct interaction he can have with the companies in the hothouse atmosphere of the venture campus. He lives about 2,500 miles west of the incubator, in Seattle. “As an entrepreneur, I’d look at them [incubators] pretty skeptically. But having done that and looking back, I think there’s a need for them in the financing chain,” Sack says. And given the newness of the breed, who’s to say that even the speed part of the equation will be borne out? “For the first 45 days it’s really valuable, and then there’s a slide for a while, and then actually I think there’s a slowdown,” says Adelman of his incubation experience. “Entrepreneurs need freedom.” Although venture capitalists have varying criteria that they use to choose the companies they’ll fund (DFJ, for example, primarily wants companies that have a market opportunity of at least $1 billion), there are certain variables that are important to them all. Among them is a balanced corporate ownership, for it is only with an equitable ownership stake that each component of the company — management team, investors, and future hires — will, in VC-speak, be “incentivized” enough to make sure the company keeps growing. The standard breakdown of ownership in a start-up after its initial round of funding, says Shari Loessberg, a lawyer who teaches entrepreneurial finance at MIT’s Sloan School, is either 40%­40%­20% or 30%­50%­20%. That is, 30% to 40% of the company is held by the investors, 40% to 50% is held by the management team (which includes the founders), and 20% is set aside as an option pool, a collection of potential stock that the founders will dispense as an inducement to new employees. In essence, VCs like to see at least 60% to 70% of the company in the hands of current and future employees after the initial funding. Because of the deal Veritas struck with Cambridge Incubator, the company’s corporate structure doesn’t come close to that. According to Adelman and Knight, here’s how the ownership pie is sliced: in addition to Schultz’s 4% and Adelman’s potential to own 11%, Knight has 23% to 24%, and Quattrocki Knight has 2%. That means that the management team (and the company doesn’t yet have a CEO) owns a total of 40% to 41%. Given the 51.22% potential maximum stake of the initial investors (CI and SeaFlower), that leaves an option pool of a meager 8% to 9%. (Although Adelman doesn’t give an exact number, he confirms that the option pool is “in the single digits.”) Thus, after Veritas’s initial funding, only 48% to about 50% of the company — as opposed to the recommended 60% to 70% — resides in the hands of the current and future employees. That could make it difficult to attract the key people the company needs. VCs agree that being in an incubator does not automatically work for or against a company as far as getting VC funding goes. But it can act as a red flag, making the VC look hard at what kind of value the incubator has brought — and will continue to bring — to the member company: Did the incubator help the company significantly improve its business plan? Did it introduce it to important business partners? Does it have solid experience in the member company’s industry? Did it help bring in key employees? How many other commitments does the incubator have? Is it incubating, say, 15 or more companies, which means that it’s likely spreading itself too thin? And it’s not the ratio of incubator staff to member companies that matters so much; rather, it’s the ratio of well-connected, experienced incubator partners to member companies. “We gauge the quality of the people who help incubate the member companies as the first cut for sorting through good companies from bad companies,” says Stanley Fung, a partner with Zero Stage Capital. Of course, it’s not enough for a VC to require, as a condition of providing financing, that a company be restructured so that its management team will have the proper incentives. For any restructuring to happen, the current investors must agree to the new terms, or they will blow the deal. Knight, Adelman, and Schultz were well aware of what needed to happen when they sat down, on March 1, for a third meeting with the angel investor. Talk turned to what the company’s valuation would be when it received its first VC funding. “New venture capital is going to dictate new terms,” said Knight. “Jim Sherblom is a reasonable guy. Tim Rowe is not in a position now to argue.” On March 23, 43 days had passed since Adelman was asked to question the worth of his company’s incubator experience over a dozen-plus cartons of Chinese food. How did the experience of Veritas Medicine measure up against the promises of Cambridge Incubator? Veritas had been in CI since the end of October — nearly a month past Rowe’s target date for a completed prototype. Adelman claimed that the company’s prototype was finished, but only 4 of the projected 40 diseases had complete scientific information, and the clinical trials listed were ones that Veritas had come up with on its own, sans the pharmaceutical companies’ participation. It’s the pharmaceutical companies, funneling their information directly into the encrypted database, that will make Veritas’s list of trials comprehensive. The start-up had one letter of intent in hand for a pharmaceutical partnership — from BASF’s Knoll, a connection that Veritas made on its own — and an oral commitment for another. Visits to seven pharmaceutical companies, which Veritas again had arranged through its own contacts, were on the calendar. The encrypted matchmaking database had not yet been built, though Adelman had commitments from two network-operations experts to construct it. The company had pushed its launch date from March to the end of June. “It’s contingent upon having enough partners to make it worthwhile,” said Adelman, who noted that five would be sufficient. Adelman acknowledged that things were going more slowly than he’d hoped. “We’ve cut our burn rate to compensate,” he said. The company, with $480,000 left in its coffers, had enough money for five more months of operation — if it slowed down its growth. It had added four staff members since the February 9 dinner meeting. No new money had come in yet, though talks with the West Coast VC were going well. On March 31, CI’s staff and three of its member companies moved into the touted venture campus. Veritas — after a bit more than five months in the incubator — did not go with them. It remained in its original location across the street, taking occupancy of the 3,300 square feet of space that Rowe and company vacated and paying rent not to CI but to the company that holds the space’s lease. Veritas now has its own phone system and T1 line. It pays a fee to use CI’s network and the new robust Sun servers that CI installed in late March. Adelman is particularly grateful for the money that Veritas is saving by having access to the latter. Tim Rowe tries to characterize the Veritas split as a matter of the member company’s having grown too big for the incubator space — though he offered Adelman 4 of the venture campus’s 14 bays, and with just 12 employees, Veritas could fit neatly into just 2. And Adelman’s take on the turn of events? He calls the move Veritas’s “graduation day,” even though the company hasn’t met any of the criteria — VC money, launch — that CI has posited for that. “Essentially, it’s an independent step. It’s a level of autonomy that we need to have,” says Adelman. “They’re looking at a Japanese style of business, a keiretsu. I’m more the American-cowboy style.” So, is incubation, for Veritas Medicine and any number of Internet start-ups, worth it? The answer — at least at this point in the story — is mixed. None of the players in this particular drama are the “bad guys.” Rather, inexperience on both sides, as well as very different personalities, business styles, and cultures, seems to have made the Veritas Medicine­Cambridge Incubator match a far-from-optimum one. “I think we should have a support group: how not to buy a boat anchor for people before they start companies,” says the angel’s coworker Seth Birnbaum. He’s joking about what it’s like to be a novice entrepreneur, but there’s a lesson in his statement. Stephen Knight openly acknowledges his navetÉ in negotiating the arrangement with Tim Rowe. “To be quite honest with you,” he says, “we don’t have a ton of experience, so I didn’t know exactly what was the right thing to do.” Howard Anderson, 55, does have a ton of experience. He’s a veteran businessman, venture capitalist, and founder of the Internet consulting firm the Yankee Group. He also recently started up his own Internet incubator in Cambridge, YankeeTek. On the subject of how much equity incubators should get, he puts on the boxing gloves (in contrast to Birnbaum’s white kid ones). “If anyone is stupid enough to negotiate away 50% of their equity for no investment, then he deserves to wind up owning a very small percentage of his company,” he says. “In Michael Lewis’s book The New New Thing, Jim Clark makes a pretty elegant case that at the end of the day, the entrepreneur deserves a lion’s share of the company.” Thea Singer is an associate editor at Inc. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

Barbarians at the Watergate

THIS PLACE Washington society adjusts to a new breed: the fast-moving, different-thinking, so very dot-com riche In a blaze of lights at the MCI Center Arena, the nouveau Madison Square Garden of Washington, D.C., basketball superstar Michael Jordan made his announcement. He was acquiring an ownership stake in the Washington Wizards and would serve as the team’s president of basketball operations. The news, widely anticipated because of leaks prior to Jordan’s January 19 appearance, played well in the capital. Neighbors couldn’t stop talking about it. Pundits had a field day. It was the knell that signaled an end to the district’s darkest days. There was a new Washington now, with a new, can-do mayor, Anthony Williams. The city’s financial crisis was over. Real estate was rebounding. And now Michael Jordan, with that perennial movie-star grin, had arrived. Only one way to go, everyone seemed to be saying — up — a direction particularly well suited to His Airness (and the loss-ridden Wizards, too). It hasn’t been that long since D.C. — besides being the seat of the most powerful government in the free world — was a ranking murder capital with a standing mayor who was an international embarrassment. The city government was so mismanaged that stories of payroll checks being issued to dead or nonexistent employees were daily fodder for the Washington Post. “We’ve taken such a bruising in the past 10 years,” says John Tydings, president of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, sort of a chamber of commerce for the Beltway. Now, though, the new mayor, the city’s comeback, and Michael Jordan — hell, even the Washington Redskins’ finally making the NFL playoffs — were like manna from heaven. But Jordan’s entrance was eye-popping in another, more significant way. The deal that brought him to town was done without any help from the usual suspects — the cabinet officials, career politicians, lobbyists, media stars, Georgetown Brahmins, society hostesses, policy heads, real estate barons, and well-connected lawyers who have made the town what it is for decades, if not centuries. No, the people who landed Jordan were outsiders, like Wizards part-owner Ted Leonsis, who helped build a local company called America Online Inc. into, arguably, the first dot-com Goliath. These new big-city players did the Jordan deal in their off-hours with play money, much of it from tech fortunes. They made a huge splash for guys who five years before hadn’t even been on the radar screen, let alone on society-party lists. But this is a new day, and not only in Washington. Now politicians are no longer the role models they used to be, especially when compared with the strike-it-rich business stars. On March 9 the Wall Street Journal likened the new era to the turn of the last century, when industrialists with names like Carnegie and Rockefeller led the first entrepreneurial revolution. “It was an era when the economy — with wildcat prosperity, businessmen as media superstars — was shifting like tectonic plates; an era when Wall Street, not the White House, drove events,” the Journal reported. The first big wake-up call for Olde Washington had come only a week before the Jordan deal went down. That’s when America Online — a once unknown speck of a company dabbling in that Internet thing from offices in the distant suburbs — announced it was buying Time Warner Inc. for upwards of $166 billion. The establishment movers and shakers were caught off guard by the hordes of tech millionaires making waves in “our city.” “They don’t know who these people are. They don’t know anything about them. They don’t even know enough to be suspicious,” says Sally Quinn, the Georgetown high-society hostess who offers a window on the elite and also helps shape its outlook through her writings in the pages of the Post. “The first moment anyone ever thought about it was the AOL thing, and they said, ‘Oh, my God! That’s what they do over there.” None of those people were bred in Georgetown. Nor did they attend St. Albans, the elite private school in northwest Washington. Most don’t even have degrees from Yale or Harvard. Worse, they couldn’t care less about the society way of life. They trade neither on their social connections nor on their pedigree but rather on their business exploits, which might include a flaming dot-com failure (it seems to give them credibility, of all things) as easily as a stunning success. Instead of considering social standing in the good old-fashioned meaning of the term, they measure one another by the growth curve of their companies, the size of their paper fortunes, and the global impact of their businesses. Washington, to put it politely, has always been defined by power and access — who’s got it, who wants it, who lost it. Money has never been a part of the equation; certainly not in the way it is in, say, New York. But now money is a force to be reckoned with, big-time, and it’s here to stay. Politics has always supplied Washington with a new crop of movers and shakers, who tended to assimilate into the standing social fabric, refreshing their own ranks with each election. But this new group of tech-fortune youngsters isn’t leaving with the next election. “The way I view it, this is the biggest thing to happen to this city since Washington was made the capital of the nation,” says Quinn, who notes that the recent arrivals are infusing much-needed new blood into a town where the old money kind of “dried up.” And she enthusiastically welcomes the transfusion. “It’s going to have a big impact in every way,” she predicts. Washington used to be quaint, run by a stable circle of friends. Not anymore. To understand how all that is playing out, you need to look at the people who made the Jordan deal happen. The aforementioned Ted Leonsis, now president of AOL Interactive Properties Group and worth an estimated $1 billion, came up with the idea. Originally, he’d been a marketing guy with a company of his own, whose operations were folded into AOL when the larger company bought him out, in 1994. The then-unproven online service paid $45 million, mostly in stock, for Leonsis’s CD-ROM catalog company. That brought Leonsis on board for practically the whole AOL ride, all the way from obscurity to megagiant. Now he’s using the resources he gained to have some real fun. In May 1999, Leonsis and two partners plunked down $200 million for the Washington Capitals hockey team and a stake in the holding company, which counts the Wizards basketball team among its multiple properties. Leonsis figured that snagging Jordan would be the ultimate buzz card, elevating the profile of both teams. He and his group took a meeting with Jordan at his Chicago restaurant. Under the deal they eventually cut, the one that was announced at the MCI Center, Jordan got the front office of the basketball team, a stake in the partnership, and a chance to play with the dot-com boys. ( Boys is not a casual term; modern as dot-coms may be, there are few women among their ranks in Washington.) The way Leonsis tells it, the Capitals’ Web site will be the foundation for building an “Internet distribution channel” for the team in the same way that Ted Turner used cable TV to promote the Atlanta Braves. Right now the Capitals are red-hot. If Jordan also manages a comeback for the Wizards in the next few years, it isn’t hard to figure the upside: valuable teams, Web channel, and then the eventual acquisition of the entire basketball franchise when its current owner, Abe Pollin, 76, retires. No doubt, this was a value investment for all concerned. Six days before Jordan made his role official, Leonsis brought in a partner, Raul Fernandez, to help design the sports-team-cum-Web vision. Fernandez immediately took a place on the roster of Washington’s new power players. Just 33, he is a card-carrying member of the current crop of dot-com millionaires. He is the founder and CEO of Proxicom Inc., a fast-growing Internet-consulting firm based in Reston, Va., that serves clients like General Electric Capital Corp., Mobil Corp., and Mercedes-Benz Credit Corp. And he’s a big sports fan. “I told Ted last summer, ‘If you ever need another partner, I’m in,” he says. Fernandez has gotten a lot of ink lately, being featured in the Wall Street Journal and on the cover of Fortune, where he appeared right next to Jordan (“America’s 40 Richest under 40″). His background speaks volumes about how diverse the new A-list in D.C. can be. Fernandez is the son of a Cuban immigrant who came to this country with $100. He grew up outside Washington, D.C., attended the University of Maryland, and then worked on Capitol Hill for Congressman Jack Kemp. In 1991, with $40,000 in savings, he formed his own company. It grew like crazy and went public in April 1999. Since then Proxicom has grown so rapidly that Fernandez’s 28% stake is now worth about $600 million. With that kind of money, he can afford to indulge his “love of competition, in any form.” Although he jets around the world all the time — Proxicom is steadily expanding — Fernandez calls the sports team his “night job.” It has raised his profile, as have his other local activities. Fernandez talks passionately about the importance of community service and appears on philanthropic panels. He is conscious of being a role model for his employees, many of whom are already millionaires in their late twenties and early thirties — the coming shock troops for the new establishment. The rise of a figure like Fernandez is just another signal that times are changing inside the Beltway. Talk to one of the society veterans, like real estate power broker Robert Linowes, about the Washington business world of the 1960s and 1970s. You’ll get a picture of a quaint, provincial town, run mostly by developers, bank managers, and retail executives, who would welcome the other power players — the pols and their minions — in full knowledge that eventually most would return to wherever it was they came from. By contrast, the old Washington hands Linowes recalls knew one another: they sat on the same corporate and philanthropic boards. In the evenings they hobnobbed with the ever-changing political-cultural elite. “It was incestuous, but no one even thought about it,” Linowes says, recalling the days when the landscape could be altered by a few words over dinner at the Willard Hotel. “Conflict of interest? If you didn’t have a conflict, you didn’t have any interest.” It was a cozy little community in those days. But that community has long faded away. The local retail chains were bought out or folded. The banks were gobbled up, the CEOs with community ties replaced by professional managers. And while Washington’s business world was devolving, the federal government was seeding a vast and entirely new industry outside the city’s borders. So-called Beltway bandits grew by feeding an insatiable demand for information technology, supplying all the computers, software, telecommunications services, and training that could fit into the budgets of federal agencies. The defense buildup and deregulation of the telecommunications industry during the 1980s fueled the growth of high tech so well, it now has more employees in the D.C. area than the federal government itself. By the mid-1990s, the local versions of Silicon Valley-style growth companies were primed like a tinderbox ready to explode. The technology, the communications, and the workforce were all in place. All that was needed was the economic spark — and then came the Internet. Mike Daniels, chairman of the Internet-domain-registration company Network Solutions Inc., based in Herndon, Va., is a prime example of a player who was brought into the game by the dot-com revolution and the explosion in Web businesses. He’s one of the “new” breed that was actually in the area all along, one of the tech executives who had worked for decades in obscurity under the shadow of the military- industrial complex. He started out as a naval research officer at ARPA (the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which invented the Internet — first known as the ARPANET) and then formed his own technology-consulting company. He sold it in 1987 to Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), an employee-owned company and one of the Beltway bandits. “We were very typical of what went on here in the Washington technology community, especially in the northern Virginia side, until the Internet revolution began,” says Daniels. In 1995 he convinced SAIC that it should buy Network Solutions for $4.8 million. Network Solutions was as close to being a world-dominating organization as there ever was, if you consider cyberspace to be the world. The company was the registrar for the Internet, the keeper of domain names on the Web. Daniels became chairman of the subsidiary and led its initial public offering. In March, VeriSign Inc. agreed to buy Network Solutions for $21 billion. Obscure no longer, Daniels is a made man. Now he appears with the Steve Cases and Michael Dells of the world on panels such as Governor Jim Gilmore’s 2000 Global Internet Summit, which was held in March in Fairfax, Va. The pace at which this new world has emerged isn’t lost on traditional power brokers like Linowes. In the past, he says, if he wanted to raise money quickly on behalf of some philanthropy, all he had to do was get on the phone. With calls to 20 close friends from the city’s business community, he could complete a fund drive. That’s all changed now. Trudging out to northern Virginia recently to seek funds for the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Linowes met with a number of the new-wealth class of greater Washington: high-tech executives. “But I had to be introduced. No one knew me,” Linowes said afterward, briefly interrupting the interview to take a call from the governor of Maryland. And what of the old crowd in the Washington business world? Where are they now? “Either dead or out of business or both,” he said, laughing. Anthony Kennedy Shriver (a member of two of the “best” families in town) started the nonprofit organization Best Buddies in 1987, when he was a student at Georgetown University. His organization offers social and employment opportunities for the mentally retarded. In the early days, he says, he relied on his family’s circle of friends — Washington’s political and cultural elite — for the donations he needed. That all changed in 1995, when Shriver was introduced to Leonsis. The AOL honcho decided to make Best Buddies his charity of choice. Leonsis came aboard as cochairman of the Best Buddies ball, the nonprofit’s fund-raising event, and one that drew many famous names. But not the names Leonsis could draw. He brought in his contacts from the high-tech world. “Honestly, in those days no one had heard of Ted Leonsis, and when I told my mother, she was like, ‘Fine, whatever. It’s your thing,” Shriver recalls. “But Ted was willing to work and get involved, and that’s what we were looking for.” Now Shriver talks about the “pre-Ted” and “post-Ted” eras at his charity. “I try to avoid remembering the pre-Ted days, because they were very unpleasant,” he says. In those early days the charity typically raised anywhere from $200,000 to $300,000 from the establishment. But with Leonsis working the phones — or rather, E-mail — the northern Virginia tech crowd began to show up in force at the Best Buddies ball and to give generously. Last year, with Leonsis’s Wizards partner Fernandez serving as cochairman of the event, tickets went as fast as shares in a dot-com IPO. With the ball oversubscribed, Shriver expanded the tent at his aunt Ethel Kennedy’s Virginia estate, and then he sold out again. When the black-tie event took place, in October, limos got stuck in the driveway. Muhammad Ali posed for pictures. The Pointer Sisters sang. The Kennedys welcomed guests. “People showed up from my family, but they didn’t know anyone, which from my perspective was a great sign,” Shriver says. Best Buddies raised a record $1.1 million that night. “When we hold events in Hollywood with a good number of celebrities, or in Houston, Palm Beach, Miami, or New York on the Forbes yacht, we raise maybe $300,000 to $400,000 a night,” Shriver says. “Washington just blows them away.” He is calling the upcoming 2000 event the “dot-com ball.” And this year he plans to raise $2 million. It will be a real A-list event, especially in the tech community — a party “where anybody who is anybody in the Internet world will be,” he says. That example hasn’t been lost on the region’s cultural institutions, ones that have been at the heart of the Washington social circuit for ages but that have been at a loss to capture much of the new wealth. “In the 1990s, at almost every board meeting I attended, the question was always raised, ‘How are we going to get those people interested?” Linowes recalls. “Almost every major foundation and charity had a committee aimed at doing just that.” “Is it a conscious strategy to get those new people involved? Yes. Is it organized? No,” says David Levy. The disconnect makes sense when you think about it. Many of the new paper millionaires are young and simply haven’t had the time that the older crowd has had to focus on how to give money away. And many of the philanthropies have never had ties to a class of people who lived on the wrong side of the Potomac River. But that’s changing. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, which as the largest privately funded art museum in the capital also runs a college of art, recently lured Bob Pittman, president and chief operating officer of AOL, to its board; he’s the first major figure from the tech community to join at that high level. Why, you might say that Pittman — the New Yorker credited with creating the massive MTV phenomenon before making his high-profile move to start shaping the world in AOL’s image — had finally arrived. But you’d better have your tongue firmly in your cheek, because in this case it seems that Pittman brings as much cachet to the Corcoran and the society it represents as they give to him. “Is it a conscious strategy to get those people involved? Yes. Is it organized? No,” says David Levy, the Corcoran’s president and director. The way he sees it, people give money for two reasons: to support the arts and education and to gain access to social and cultural circles in Washington. “We provide that access, and they provide the support,” Levy says. What’s not clear, however, is whether access to society is something the dot-com crowd wants. Where a charity-board seat might have been de rigueur for the well-bred, it’s more of a fun option for the newly minted. As Linowes says, “We had a certain way of giving and a certain level of giving. These people want to do things in new ways.” Remember, many high-tech fortunes were spawned by battling the establishment business world. These start-ups exploited small niches and built new entities by going against the grain. The late Bill McGowan, founder of MCI, is a perfect example. In fact, he’s something of an Ôber role model for many of the established entrepreneurs in the region, because his Washington-based company battled giant AT&T for years. McGowan used to exhort his troops, Whatever AT&T does, do the opposite. That rattle-the-gates strategy worked for all who followed, and they prospered by it. Why change any of those attitudes now? Already, there are strong indications that Washington’s technology elite is treating philanthropy in a very different way from that of the establishment. Many even take umbrage at the word philanthropy, since it suggests a handout rather than an attempt at producing fundamental change in people’s lives. Mario Morino, chairman of the nonprofit Morino Institute, in Reston, Va., for example, speaks in no uncertain terms of the need for “social change” to correct the huge disparities in wealth and opportunity for youth in the region. He’s not going by Karl Marx; quite the opposite. He’s repeating lessons learned by virtue of his entrepreneurial experience, which some would term ultimate capitalism. Morino earned his first entrepreneurial merit badge building Legent Corp., a software company that was sold to Computer Associates International Inc. in 1995 for $1.8 billion. By then Morino had stepped back from day-to-day business affairs and embarked on an eight-year odyssey to figure out how to give some of his $140 million away. Oddly, he found it harder to properly give his wealth away than it was to build it in the first place. [In the interests of full disclosure, the writer of this article worked on speeches for Morino a couple of years ago.] “We took [MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor] to lunch, and over the course of that lunch his net worth went up by $145 million.” –Lloyd Grove, society columnist fpr the Washington Post

Meet Mie-Yun Lee

Mie-Yun Lee is an expert on businesspurchasing for the office. Since she founded BuyerZone.com, Lee has given small and midsizebusinesses advice on purchasing issues of all types,and her opinion has been sought for articles and programs in leading media,including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and CNBC. In addition, Lee regularly contributes buyer’s guides forpublications like Entrepreneur magazine and Inc. Technology,and writes “Savvy Business Shopper,” a weekly syndicated column carried in leading businessjournals, including Crain’s and American City Business Journals publications. Lee’s book-writing credits incude The Essential Business Buyer’s Guide,available in bookstores nationwide. She was formerly the editor of BusinessConsumer Guide, a bimonthly publication providing in-depth information andexpert buying advice on thousands of office products and services. She currently serves as editorial director of BuyerZone.com, an Internet purchasing hubfor small and midsized businesses.Site visitors can post messages to Lee with questions or tips, and she also overseesresearch and development activities for the site. Lee is a graduate of Yale University. She cofounded her company in 1992 as a provider of business purchasing advice. Selected articles about Mie-Yun Lee: ” Taking the Pain out of Purchasing“