We had a great kickoff to the new "season" of programs at the EEC on Tuesday night, when we hosted the IEEE Boston Entrepreneurs' Network (ENET) September meeting "Launching Your Successful Company."  There are many more upcoming events of interest to entrepreneurs at the EEC in September, so check out our events calendar.

The slides from the presenters will be posted to the ENET website shortly, so I won't try to summarize them in full, but some interesting take aways from the three presenters:

 Michael Kuperstein talked about the last year of his life and the massive market shifts that have occurred in the mobile app space (the "iPhone app gold rush").  He talked about the five filters he goes through when deciding on good business ideas: Compelling use, profitable, differentiable, defensible, and scalable. He also had a number of lessons learned which you can see in hid slides, including "if you have a good idea, its likely 10 other people with money have it too" and "if you get started when there is a buzz, you are too late."  I'm not sure I fully agree with the second point, as many people have talked elsewhere about how the biggest success is not always the first mover (for example, Google in search and Facebook in social networking). He also said something to the effect that "if people don't recognize the potential in 5 seconds, its not a good idea."

Jack Derby, who is a great speaker and on the board of one of my clients, then gave a presentation about the "architecture" of building a business.  He quoted SunTzu as his favorite entrepreneur, and also mentioned that the biggest mistake he sees startups make is "lack of consistency on the part of the CEO."  In talking about building the team, he mentioned that research has shown the most successful startups have three or more founders.

Finally, Alain Hanover talked about his experiences at NTV, including his best investment, Sandvideo.  He had a lot of great advice about starting a company and the steps to success.  But the part I found most interesting was his description of some of the problems he experienced with having a very small venture fund:

• even with a focus on capital efficiency, the companies always needed more money than they thought they would,   
• development (both of the products but also the customer base) always took longer than projected
• all of this often led to subsequent cram-down rounds without a fund large enough to always participate pro rata
• the need for deeper pocketed investors to be able to continue

None of these should be that surprising, but given the talk recently of the need for more small VC funds (such as the newly formed Founders Collective) to fill the "capital gap" these made for some interesting counterpoints.