Organizing Perspectives from 1st Year Sloanies…

Hello, we are first year MBA students at MIT Sloan and part of the organizing team at this year’s VC conference. As we reach the final stages of preparation for the conference, we are very excited about it! Our role in this conference is to manage one of the panels – “Exit Strategies”. Given the current economic conditions this topic is obviously very relevant at the conference!

The organization of the panel itself is complete with the moderators and panelists having been finalized. Our panel moderator is going to be Bo Fishback who is a Vice-President of Entrepreneurship at the Kaufmann Foundation. Our panelists bring to the table the perspectives of both venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. They include Steve O’Leary of General Catalyst Partners, Ryan Moore of GrandBanks Capital and Reed Sturtevant of Microsoft Startup Labs. The central theme of this panel will be Exits - Initial “Private” Offerings and VC Buy-Outs - Tackling exit strategies in the new frontier. Our discussion will focus on how exit strategies are being reinvented, how VCs attitudes are changing and whether, with exits taking longer, IPOs and M&As held off, will some sort of dividends/royalties be a way to see returns. There will also be opinions expressed on how early stage companies are getting bought out by corporate and if entrepreneurs actually prefer such acquisition exits. How will VCs compete in this market for a share of the pie? In the reinventing venture capital landscape, should VCs focus on investing in series A, or series B rounds? How do series A funded companies, obtain series B funding, and if it’s not available, do they get acquired? And from the focus of entrepreneurs, there will also be discussion on investments - if early stage investments are hard to come by and exits disappear how do start-ups keep going? How can they obtain project financing for capital intensive (Cleantech, Life sciences) ventures?

This conference has been a great experience for both of us. It has provided us excellent opportunities to meet people who are also interested in the VC/start-up space and learn about the different facets of being a venture capitalist or an entrepreneur. It has also been a lot of fun being part of the organizing committee of such a leading conference.

Courtney Skay and Vinay Subramanian