Independent Game Thoughts

The Louisville Venture Club meeting happened again today.  I’ve been attending these meetings for just over eight months now with the thought that if I don’t go to meetings like this, then there’s no way that I will meet investors for Ages of Athiria.  After eight months of paying for these luncheons, I can say that I’ve met quite a few people and by and large the experience has been a good experience.  I think the goal and the idea of the Louisville Venture Club is in the right place.  Mark Crane of GLI even issued a challenge to the room this afternoon.  He challenged them to invest in Louisville instead of investing in the same type of asset class in some other city.  The challenge was received well and I look forward to see if there is any follow through on behalf of the investment community.  That said, I’m left with a feeling that the Venture Club of Louisville might not be a good investment of my time and money.  My reasoning is that the end goal of gaining funding for Ages of Athiria is very likely not going to happen through this club.  This is my second try at this club.  I was a five minute presenter in 2002 and left the group after my five minute presentation and subsequent one minute presentations failed to generate any significant interest in my project.  I returned to the Venture Club in December of 2008 hoping that the club had evolved beyond the healthcare investing and energy investing of the 2002 days.  Sadly it seems as if it has not, though I hope I am proved wrong in the coming months.

Consider all of the five minute presenters and one minute presenters from October 2007 to date.  Some of the dates are missing because they are not provided on the Venture Club web site.  Funding amounts come from the most recent presentation of “Who’s Funded” by Mark Crane at today’s Venture Club Meeting.  “Who’s Funded” covers only 2009 investments and as such it is possible that the presenters in 2007 – 2008 received money that is not reflected below.  Total 2009 investment that GLI knows about is $11.8M + some unknown amount to a single company that we know did a deal last month.

I’ve been debating the value of the five minute presentation in my head for the past few months.  The way I see it, the value just isn’t there, though after my discussion with Mark Crane following today’s meeting, I’m probably going to do it anyway just for the practice.  It’s almost as if the investment community in Louisville has run scared as evidenced by today’s announcement of only $11.8M of investment through July 2009.   For the 16th largest city in the USA, this number is pretty low in my opinion.  It should be an order of magnitude higher than that.  The question is, how do you shake this up and get things moving again?  Why is the Louisville investment community not being entrepreneurial?  Where’s all the money that Chrysalis Ventures has hidden in its stash going?  Is Louisville indicative of other investment communities in the US?  Based on my conversations with others that attended the meeting, Cincinnati and Indianapolis generate the same feeling.  I’m positive that I don’t have all the information but as an entrepreneur sitting at these meetings, this is my opinion of the situation and it leads me to believe Ages of Athiria funding will come from outside Louisville.  Someone please prove me wrong.  I’d love nothing more than to eat those words.

Even if it were better to leave Louisville, getting our word out to those communities is a significantly larger investment from our standpoint.  Is it even worth it to travel to find investment?  Last time we did it, we ripped through cash and came up empty handed.  These are all the questions running through my head every time yet another month goes by without finding the money needed to execute our project.

At the end of the meeting, I challenged Mark Crane of GLI to look at the results of these meetings and the list on his “Who’s Funded” slides.  I got the feeling that he genuinely cared about the possibly changing perception of the Venture Club from an entrepreneur’s standpoint.  I want to present to the community but at the same time, I don’t want to waste my time and money if there’s next to no chance it will result in something.  At the very least, I keep going back for the networking benefits but there has to be a better way to search for a needle in a haystack than networking long enough to hit that random encounter that generates interest.