Twenty startups are involved in the media-equity program to-date and all are in different stages of development.

Any company can apply for the program as long as they meet the criteria set forth by Seven Brand Ventures. The main criteria is that the startup has not appeared on any television stations. It appears that the media buys that will be used for this program will be remnant slots.

Regarding one of the startups in the program, Deutsche Startups notes (translated), “At Outlet Online Shop Sneakerloft can already draw a first conclusion: Since the campaign began three months ago are in the Web store, according to ProSiebenSat.1 has already received over 10,000 orders.”

The story concludes by noting that this program is a win-win for both parties. The television stations fill their open ad slots and the startups get free television advertising with a small equity position in return. This program could also lead to future partnerships between both parties as well.

TechAviv Angels Launch

TechAviv founder Yaron Samid has announced the launch of a new angel investing group named TechAviv Angels. Several popular NYC startup founders are part of the group including Ron Yekutiel from Kaltura and Yaron Galai from Outbrain. It looks like about 15 entrepreneurs make up the TechAviv Angels group. In addition, a number of early stage VC firms are participating as well.

From the announcement, “We seek to identify, fund and mentor our next generation of big winners. Every two months in Tel Aviv 5 startups get 5 minutes to pitch in front of our members. We’re an informal Angel club with members investing individually.”

It’s free to present and the first demo night will be held on November 24. I am unsure of is if the demo event will be held in NYC or in Israel. I will update this post once I find out the answer. More details on Ouriel Ohayon’s blog.

RRE Offers Office Hours

NYC VC firm RRE Ventures has announced that they will now offer office hours beginning on November 9. Each entrepreneur can signup for a 15-minute slot and discuss any topic with the venture capital team at RRE. RRE has invested in a number of NYC-based startups including Adaptive Blue, Drop.io and GoMobo.

Additionally, nextNY founder Charlie O’Donnell will join the FRC team as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR). O’Donnell is a popular figure in the New York startup scene and he is also the founder of career startup Path 101. Check out all of our Path 101 coverage.

O’Donnell notes in his announcement post that Path 101 isn’t going away but two of the three founders will continue  the project with a nights and weekend development cycle.  Co-founder Alex Lines has taken a position with NY-based Betaworks.

Xconomy has more details on the funding.  The full list of Shareaholic’s angel investors includes:

• Ed Roberts, founder, MIT Entrepreneurship Center; co‐founder, Sohu.com
• Dharmesh Shah, founder and chief technology officer, HubSpot
• Eric Dobkin, Advisory Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.
• Brian Balfour, co‐founder, Viximo
• David Cancel, co‐founder, Compete
• Andrew Payne, investor in Care.com, Digium, HubSpot, and SmartFlix; co‐founder, FanSnap
• Brian Shin, founder and CEO, Visible Measures

The company is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It looks like their business model will be based on data usage. Check out our post about their buzz monitor launch from this past summer.

The idea behind the presentation is to help you create the most ideal pitch to secure the funding your startup is seeking. There is a discussion about font sizing, market, what’s the problem your startup is solving, customer base, go-to market strategy, team (what makes the team special), along with information on financials and competition.

The Passpack announcement about the funding goes into great detail about how the funds will be used. The list includes: continued product development, infrastructure, marketing, more content on their blog and some secret items which they won’t share at this time.

With all of the talk last week of busted Twitter passwords and the push for passwords that look like ‘dsdk2929!@#$a924′ , Passpack might be in a perfect position to capitalize on the current buzz.

Webware’s Josh Lowensohn has a good review of Passpack. Additional reviews on Mashable and Lifehacker.

Groupable provides a marketplace bringing together online/offline groups and sponsors. The company describes their service as, “We are an online marketplace connecting groups of all types to corporate and local sponsors.” The concept is interesting because so many groups and recurring meetups are always looking for a helping hand from a sponsor for food, venue, etc.

To learn more about Groupable, checkout our initial review. My only concern with Groupable is the ability to get a large enough supply of sponsors into the network. Today’s announcement of their angel round of funding should help gain more groups and sponsors.

When asked what Fred looks for in a deal he noted:

• they look for companies that are changing the game in a big way
• companies that are shaking something up
• companies that work better than the companies in the sector
• some of the areas they are looking for deals in education, finance, energy, environment and government

Other topics in the video:

• dealsize USV looks for
• discusses his blog
• why Boxee is doing great things
• potential venture regulation
• general vc market commentary

I meet lots of web entrepreneurs who tell me they want to raise venture capital. Most of these people are first time entrepreneurs and they just assume that once they’ve got an idea, the next thing to do is raise venture capital. That’s naive. I always ask myself is, “is this person/company ready to raise money?” and 99 times out of 100 the answer is “no”. I’m writing this post in an effort to explain what goes through my head at those times and when it is right to raise institutional capital.

So, when is the time to raise Venture capital?

When: you don’t need the money

This may seem counter-intuitive on a whole bunch of levels, but the time to raise money is when you don’t need it. What I mean by “don’t need it” is you can carry on without it, or you have alternatives (like other people who want to invest, or a house you will mortgage). Many entrepreneurs don’t understand the value of finding their way without VC money, or they think they need the money more than they actually do, or they think they need it sooner than they do, or all of the above! (READ: the 7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks) The result is they spend a lot of time too early in their businesses lifecycle focused on serving VCs instead of serving their customers. Raising money is a negotiation. You need options when you are sitting at the bargaining table – you need a path without capital, a legitimate path.

When: you have a product

Don’t talk to a VC until you have a product. There are exceptions to every rule, but unless you have built a successful business before, or your business requires millions and millions of dollars to build V1 of your product (think microchips), don’t talk to VCs before you have a working product or prototype.

I’ve met entrepreneurs who tell me, “I’ve got this great idea, I’m going to start shopping it around to VCs.” Thanks to the web, it’s incredibly cheap to build a business. VCs know this too and their role in building businesses have changed since the first internet bubble. Back then entrepreneurs with ideas needed VCs to pay for infrastructure and servers and bandwidth – these things used to be expensive –today they are not. The consequence, VCs have no incentive to fund ideas…they can wait till later in the process of building a business. And it’s important that they do because they want to be sure…

When: You know your customer better than anyone

I personally believe this is the most misunderstood milestone on the path to raising Venture Capital for both VCs and entrepreneurs – the “I know my customers better than anyone” stage. If you know your customers, or perhaps you’ve scratched your own itch and you ARE your customer, you are now enormously valuable to yourself and anyone who is going to invest in you. The difference between VCs and entrepreneurs is customers: entrepreneurs have them, VCs don’t (though I’d argue their LPs are their customers, and the best of the VCs know that entrepreneurs are their customers and they serve them accordingly…but I digress). Knowledge of your customer is what is going to make you a better strategic decision maker and product designer than your VCs could ever hope to be. Remember Facebook Beacon? From what I gather Zuckerberg was against it because he knew his customer, the VCs…well, let’s just say Beacon looked great on paper.

Knowing your customer better than anyone is valuable. You should use it as a bargaining chip when it does come time to negotiate, but you have to invest in it. You need to phone your users, take them out to lunch and surveys are not enough. It doesn’t come fast or easy. So build your product and get to know your customers – I’d suggest 100 conversations (not emails!) is a good start. And don’t try to tell me they won’t talk to you on the phone. Have you asked? Email them an invite to speak with the founder of the service they are using about their experience. Your early adopters will be all over that. And if you have enough early adopters…

When: You have traction

If you have a product and you know your customers better than anyone, you are on your path to traction. But if people don’t become repeat users of your site or service, then you need to make sure they do. Do your customers refer you? Do you have early adopters who champion you? Do people write you up in blogs or on twitter of their own free will? Repeatedly? Do people actually pay for your service?!! Those are signs of traction. VCs have enough good opportunities in front of them that they can choose from companies that have traction – you better make sure you do, and your friends using the service does not count.

Finally, when: you know what you’re getting yourself into

Don’t raise money if you think it means you’re going to stay in control. Raising money is the first step on the path to loss of control – know that. It starts with equity and a board seat. It’s my belief that if you raise money once you’ll raise money three times. If that’s the case…you might like the terms at round one, but have you thought about the terms at rounds two and three? If you have and you like your place at that stage of the race, proceed. If not, don’t. Really…you should be asking yourself, do I want to build something big or do I want control. IF you want control, you’re going to be very unhappy with the VC path, so do the gut check before you proceed.

Disclaimer: I have never raised Venture Capital and FreshBooks has no institutional backing. That said, I have raised money and I do spend a lot of time thinking about capital, and I handle a lot of calls from VCs who would like to invest in FreshBooks. Bottom line: take my advice as you will.

Originally posted on the Freshbooks Blog.

Check out the video below from the event which covered topics including: an overview of the VC industry,
the venture capital fundraising process, company formation types (LLC, corporations, etc.), term sheets, and what to do after investment. There’s also a discussion about whether VC funding is right for you and your business.

The video runs just over three hours and you can listen to the audio while working.

DAG Ventures led the new Series C round and existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and Jonathan Miller, the company’s board chairman, all participated.

For the OpenX hosted program, the company reports growth of 500% to 7.5 billion monthly impressions. They also note that 10,000 web publishers are using the hosted program.

Interestingly, OpenX shares some bits about their revenue model which is broken up into four parts:

• professional services for publishers
• premium support packages
• premium Hosted packages
• OpenX Market

The model is a similar but different to the popular Y Combinator incubator. It looks like SproutBox will provide more hands-on management over the startups. Sproutbox notes, “The SproutBox team includes full-time coders, creatives and business experts who provide a range of essential services for start-ups — from software development and marketing to administrative assistance, HR, and accounting.” Basically SproutBox looks like a full-service Web shop that helps to get an entrepreneur’s idea from concept to initial launch while taking an equity stake in the company.

 “The current start-up culture is simply failing entrepreneurs. The traditional model ramps up expenses and de-emphasizes revenue during early stages — meaning these companies must find additional funding just to keep their doors open. And today’s economic climate and severe illiquidity further exacerbate the problem. We founded SproutBox to change this model and remove the obstacles that prevent entrepreneurs from turning their idea into a money-making reality,” said Mike Trotzke, co-founder and managing member of SproutBox.

SproutBox is looking for web-based applications with subscription-based revenue models to work with. The initial timeframe is three months with a three month transition period afterwards. It will be interesting to keep track of how SproutBox does this year with their incubator-model along with their physical location.

Gist is led by T.A. McCann who was previously part of the Microsoft’s Exchange Server Group team.

While I don’t have access to the Gist beta, it appears that the service is similar to Xobni in that it works within email applications. Eventually the company hopes to offer a paid subscription model.

John Cook at TechFlash has an in-depth of Gist and how the service works. Cook notes, “Organizing Web information and then parsing it in such a way that it is meaningful to the reader is a big opportunity that heavyweights such as Facebook, Microsoft and Google also are attempting to address.”

The tool seems easy to use and walks you through about 100 questions to create the term sheet. Each of the questions offers a description and explanation. There is a save function although it is very basic as it forces you to save a XML file which you can later import to continue the work. The ability to have multiple people work on the term sheet via a login/password might be a good upgrade for the system.

Altgate also notes, “the Term Sheet Generator originated as an internal tool for WSGR attorneys to rapidly generate draft term sheets which they would polish up and then deliver to their clients”. Altgate believes that the real customer for this tool will be other law firms and attorneys.

Naturally no free document creator will ever take the place of actually consulting with an attorney, but it could provide entrepreneurs with a free start.

Pontiflex describes their service as, "offering advertisers the opportunity to purchase high-quality customer leads via brand-specific banner and direct response ad units. These ‘marketing leads’ generated via the Pontiflex platform represent potential customers who have voluntarily opted in to receive advertisers’ messages."

David Kaplan at PaidContent has more on the transaction. David discusses the difference between marketing leads and sales leads and spoke with Pontiflex CEO Zephrin Lasker regarding transparency and the company’s opt-in methods.