Tomorrow (20th May 2009) - Exits and Fund Raising - Tales & Insights

Quick note to advise that Ed French, Venture Capitalist at Enteprise Ventures - Rising Stars will be joining our panel tomorrow to discuss Exits and Fund Raising - Tales & Insights. As you know, Ed's fund has invested into number of Northern Startups, some of these being, Yuuguu, ensembli, Mgami, Wadaro to name a few. Ed's fund is also one of the three Venture Capital Consortia bidding for £120 million circa. venture capital from NWDA and ERDF for investing into northern startups over the next 3 years.

Please consider paying for tickets on line to avoid paying more at the door. If you trully value the efforts taken by Northern StartUp 2.0 to create an ecosystem for tech companies, please consider subscribing to membership plan

Ed will be joined by Ajaz Ahmed of Freeserve Fame, Manoj Patel, CEO of Lanxoma, who recently raised $1m in funding from the USA for his startup, and Robert Wakeling, CEO of Wadaro, searching for that elusive second round of funding.

Our keynote speaker, Ajaz requires no introduction as he is a well know figure in the North. But in case you did not know....

Ajaz Ahmed is the Founder of Freeserve, the UK’s largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) now known as Orange. His eureka moment came when he bought a PC at PC World in Leeds and nobody in the store could tell him how to get onto the Internet. After much persuasion by him, Dixons launched Freeserve in September 1998 and became the UK’s largest ISP in just three short months. It floated just nine months later at a market cap of £1.5bn and entered the FT 100 soon after, in March 2000 it had a market cap of £9bn. Ajaz was one of the three founding executives to launch the business, seeing it through flotation and the £1.6bn sale to Wanadoo. Ajaz held the position of Business Development Director until April 2001 when he left the company to pursue a variety of business interests. He now sits a number of boards and has a number of investments which he is actively involved in and he also sits on the Governing Council at the University of Huddersfield.

Exits and Fund Raising are two classic areas that most tech businesses need to pay attention to, and review on an on-going basis. Whilst some companies raise cash pre-revenue, others raise cash for growth. How would you prepare your company for funding? Having achieved set targets, how would you prepare your company for exit? What are the investor sentiments on cashing in during each round of funding? Make sure you purchase a ticket to be part of this discussion.

As I have been wee bit busy over the last couple of weeks with exibiting edocr.com at the Internet World in London and then been part of Futuresonic 2009 in Manchester, I forgot all about finding a tech entrepreneur for StartUp4Slaughter slot. If you wish to take advantage of this exclusive session, please contact me immediately. An unique session that allow a tech entrepreneur to present his or her company to the audience highlighting the biggest issue faced at the time. Through rapid Q&A, audience and the panel attempts to provide solutions to resolve the issue faced by the tech entrepreneur. Past sessions featured, Lisa Scales of TalentOnView, Ash Mokhberi of DistinctID and Lisa Layzell of ThinSpace.

Hopefully, the weekly newsletter will be sent tomorrow informing the forthcoming Tech Mission London 2009 featuring Michael Birch (Bebo), Nic Brisbourne (DFJ Esprit), Andrew Scott (Rummble), Davide Maher Roberts (the Filter) and many more investors and london startups. This will be run in conjunction with Being Digital. Keep an eye out for the newsletter coming tomorrow.