After the Bubble Burst, Mike Krenn Built a Venture Pipeline

he was the head of business development for a San Diego startup called SelectTeeTimes.com that provided online reservations for golf courses. It became Golfer.com, and sometime after that, the company hit a hazard and went under.

But I’m guessing Krenn is a better screener and scrubber of business plans because of it. He’s also helped found Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels, he was the founding executive director and board member of the telecom industry group CommNexus, and serves as a board member of the San Diego Venture Group.

Krenn, who is not a lawyer, says he founded the Venture Pipeline with a co-worker who works in DLA Piper’s Sacramento office. “We built our own proprietary data base that identifies venture firms and shows which DLA Piper lawyer worked with them previously.” Krenn says. In addition to Sacramento, Krenn now has counterparts in Reston, VA; Austin, TX; and the San Francisco Bay Area.

“We spend our time going off to meet with VCs and really trying to understand what they’re doing,” Krenn says. “The VCs love it, because they know the deals we’re sending them have been screened and scrubbed.”

It’s a free service for DLA Piper clients, and Krenn’s group only works with the firm’s clients. What does the law firm get out of it? Krenn says it “absolutely” helps the corporate securities group bring in new venture companies as clients. It also helps the firm’s lawyers network with VCs and new companies, and they get more legal work as a result.

Of the roughly 800 business plans the Venture Pipeline reviews each year, Krenn says the group tries to shop between 100 and 120 to VCs—and about a third of those actually get funded. In recent months, the Venture Pipeline group hasn’t seen much of a decline in the number of business plans. But he doubts the number of deals in 2009 will come anywhere close to previous years.

“The VCs are really hunkering down and trying to conserve capital,” Krenn says. He can’t point to anything specific. “I just get the sense that the bar is a lot higher now to get things funded. Things can still get done. It’s just a little harder, I think.”

Yes, it’s always harder after the wild rumpus has ended.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.