"I thought nothing else was important but those 10 minutes."
But for Lucy, A.G., and Shoba, boot camp marks the start of an arduous journey with lots of risks and no guaranteed rewards. The entrepreneurs can't forget that they're playing the VC game in a man's world. (The percentage of VC dollars flowing to female entrepreneurs is still paltry at 5%.) The women have just five weeks to perfect their pitch and convince this world that they hold the next billion-dollar market opportunity in the palm of their hand. All while running their companies.
At boot camp, Shoba, A.G., and Lucy each meet their main coaches, the people who will take the women under their wings and spend long hours helping them craft a 10-minute presentation. "It's an intense getting-to-know-you process," says Amy Millman, president of Springboard Enterprises. The New England forum is brimming with more than 100 volunteer VCs, bankers, lawyers, CPAs, executive recruiters, successful entrepreneurs, and business consultants. (And that doesn't count Springboard's network in Silicon Valley, Chicago, New York City, Dallas, and Washington, D.C.)
Springboard graduates like Jill Card are also on hand to provide their insights. Card, the founder and chairman of IBEX Process Technology, has raised $6.8 million. Once painfully shy, she shares how she finally overcame her stage fright. "The best advice I can give you is to imagine your audience naked -- 300 venture capitalists naked."
Scene II: Coaching, McKinsey & Co. offices, October 19, 2001. Three weeks to the VC forum.
"You guys rock!" says A.G.
The young cofounder of PrivaSource is sitting in a plush conference room inside the hallowed halls of the upper-crust Boston offices of McKinsey & Co., one of many Springboard sponsors that agreed to loan out their highly paid employees for a block of time. On this day, for the first and perhaps only time, more than a dozen of the Springboard women will receive 60 minutes of free tutoring from one of the most highly regarded consulting firms in the world.
A.G. is on the edge of her seat. After weeks of crafting her presentation and cranking out slides, she relishes this moment. The McKinsey consultants have been instructed to grade the entrepreneurs on the content and length of their presentations, on the quality of their slides, and on style (pitch, pacing, stance, body language, eye contact, and so on).
A.G. begins her pitch with an amusing anecdote showing how easy it is, with a little technology, to figure out someone's identity from supposedly private medical data. A cleverly created slide features the faces of some well-known people and their fictional ailments. The slide and story serve to grab the audience, providing a perfect segue into the entrepreneur's explanation of her company's solution to a pressing problem.
"Your style is great, so I won't mess with it," says McKinsey consultant Susan Mulder. A.G. is clearly comfortable in her own skin. After all, few female entrepreneurs show up at McKinsey's doorstep wearing army green pants, a black turtleneck, and a concealed tattoo. But the nonconformist A.G. can't ignore all business conventions. Specifically, she is struggling with the question that vexes every company founder that ever was: How big is my market, and what's my slice of it?
Clearly, A.G. needs help shoring up her revenue model. Is it based on service fees or hardware or both? Mulder and her McKinsey colleagues advise her to separate revenue streams and detail the assumptions behind the sales numbers. She has never done any of that before.
After 60 minutes, A.G. emerges from McKinsey triumphant, with her own personal punch list: "work on sales projections, be clear about target customer, include exit strategy, and talk more about my background." She is elated, even if what she got was just a glimpse into the McKinsey mind. "An hour of McKinsey time? I tend to be pretty cynical about these things, but I loved the process," she says later.
Lucy, of Chaoticom, delights in her McKinsey moment, even though she gets trounced for discounting one of her largest competitors: Microsoft. Hey, selling the company may be more valuable than an IPO, the McKinsey folks point out. Lucy nods in agreement, soaking up every word. If she comes off as cocky, perhaps it's the salesperson in her coming out. "What I learned from McKinsey is, Don't talk bad about the competition," she says afterward. "Microsoft could be an acquirer down the road. They're not the total evil enemy -- it's good to have a rival."
Shoba gets her McKinsey coaching in New York. But she makes weekly trips to Boston to convene with other advisers. A coach at Ernst & Young has even arranged for her to practice before half a dozen venture capitalists and angel investors. She hears conflicting advice. The biggest debates revolve around how much funding she should ask for -- $2 million? $3 million? $5 million? -- and how to begin her presentation. As she hustles to incorporate one suggestion after another into her presentation, her message becomes more convoluted. She scarcely recognizes her own pitch.
Shoba isn't the only one making last-minute revisions. Recounting how many times she's changed her pitch, Lucy says, "I'm coming back around to where I started out."
Act II: The Dress Rehearsal
Scene I: Walk-through day, Boston law firm Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, October 24, 2001. Two weeks to the VC forum.
"We're not your coaches," Bob Franklin, an executive recruiter, says to Shoba. "You've got to get focused!"
The words hit Shoba like a tidal wave. She and the other presenters have reported to a Boston law firm to individually "defend" their presentations before a panel of 6 to 10 Springboard observers, including VCs, executive coaches, consultants, and lawyers. The observers have received a few last-minute special instructions. "Help them not sound too girlish. Better to sound like an ice queen," says one Springboard manager.
