Sometimes everyone needs a hand to hold onto -- especially a startup in today's market. If you don't have an address book full of contacts, your idea might never turn into a real business. So what's a potential CEO to do?
Consultants such as Garage.com and Venture One have long been abetting tentative startups, but new non-profits like the Dry Run Program for Startups and Greenhouse for Startups offer free or low-cost networking opportunities to the CEOs, VCs, tech attorneys, PR folks, and financial advisers at monthly sessions.
Greenhouse's Jad Duwaik says he aims for a mix of pros from all levels of the tech industry to facilitate that all-important networking assistance, which he said he sorely needed when he moved to San Francisco to launch his company.
"I couldn't assemble a management team or get an attorney, much less get funded," Duwaik says. "The only ones who would take a meeting with me were similarly desperate and unconnected."
Greenhouse and Dry Run give CEOs the opportunity to put an untried business plan through its paces, hosting sessions in which members pitch for hypercritical audiences of VCs and industry types. "It's hard on the ego, but in a half-hour they get thousands of dollars of expertise," says Dry Run's Don Bell. Not to mention the connections that make the startup business go around.
