Name dropping, expanded
October 10th, 2007 by Benjamin KuoThere’s an interesting post this morning by Mark Davis, a VC at DFJ Gotham on Silicon Alley Insider, talking about name dropping — which is the habit of (usually green) entrepreneurs of mentioning someone famous/influential in hopes of making their idea or company sound better. Other similar things to avoid if you’re an entrepreneur:
1. Mentioning that you’ve “just met with (tier 1 VC) yesterday” or “have a meeting scheduled with (notable VC investor) tomorrow”. Lots of companies and people with not-so-great ideas can set up meetings with VC firms–that doesn’t validate your idea unless they actually fund you.
2. Including non-customers (and logos) in your PowerPoint. The typical use of this is including Oracle/IBM/Microsoft/Google/Yahoo on a slide labeled “Customers” — and after you dig in a bit into their presentation you realize these are “potential” customers on a “prospective target list”. btw — NEVER do this when a VC is on the board of your “proespective company”, you’ll never get funding when they ask their CEO what they think of your company. This also tends to be abused in “Sales Pipeline” slides.
3. Probably an LA thing, but if you’re a company selling enterprise software, the fact that you have (insert Hollywood celebrity here) on your board of directors isn’t so flattering. I run across dozens of companies who have random Hollywood actors on their board — yet, I can’t think of many Hollywood actors who are well known for their business acumen.
