Thursday’s New York Venture Summit, hosted by Staten Island’s youngStartup Ventures, brought venture capitalists and other investors together in New York’s financial district to hear pitches from startups out to impress them. The seventy-five companies that were there presented ideas in technology, life sciences, and clean technology at a time one investment banker described as ripe for deal making.
“It’s a great market to get investments, but the problem is you need to know how much to take,” says Sean M. Cross, a managing director with investment bank Progress Partners in New York. He served as moderator at the event for a panel on making solid deals with venture capitalists. Cross cautioned that overeager entrepreneurs who give up large potions of their companies for early-stage funding may have little left to offer in later investment rounds.
Resilience, he says, is essential for entrepreneurs in pursuit of funding. “As a banker I will bring in investors, VCs, and even angel investors, and what they are looking for is someone with a passion for what they are doing,” he says. “You don’t have to be the deepest in technology but any entrepreneur has got to
