I never did write up my trip to Venturefest in Oxford, did I?
A final fling for Powermagic, well, for the moment at least. I booked into a travel lodge at the bottom of the hill by the Cowley works junction of the ring road….this isn’t going to be a fun way to wake up on Monday morning, is it? In the event it wasn’t that unpleasant – I wonder howcome theres always so much traffic when I’m trying to drive that section of the road?
The first thing I noticed about the conference itself was the selection of cars, with two distinct types, the ten year old bangers and the new-model Mercs and Beamers. Everyone is either desperately in need of money or has more than they sensibly know what to do with.
There were two marquees in the car park of Unipart, the parts arm of the Cowley plant, and some presentations being made in their conference facilities. The exhibition in the tents was made of two halves, some ‘permanent’ stands, those there for the whole two days, and some constantly changing minor exhibits. The majority of stands were trying to bribe people to stay nearby by offering sweets or nicer coffee than the caterers (which wasn’t much of a challenge).
A lot of the stands were peopled by the bright young things from their respective offices, bringing cute young girls along to a fair largely populated with old rich guys and aspiring entrepeneurs seems somehow cynical but probably does the job. Grandi was in his element.
There were a series of presentation tracks, too. We went along to a number of talks by hopeful companies seeking finance. It was interesting to see the different presentation styles, and different reactions to their unrealistic financial forecasts. Some had much stronger stories than others, all were crazy ideas in their own ways, but highlights of idiocy included floating petal houses and flirtomatic.
My general feel from the two days was that there is plenty of finance looking for opportunities and a scarcity of appropriate investments for a lot of people. It has also made me believe more strongly that the way to succeed in this world is to have a self funded business expanding from profit – venture and angel finance is useful for a certain subset of businesses for which the window of opportunity is near enough that a for-profit approach won’t allow them to move quick enough (many tech companies fall into this subset) but it is so expensive.
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