When you are financing an emerging enterprise, the entrepreneur should forget about comparing valuations.  Pick the investment partner with whom you have trust and share a chemistry.  And, ignore the websites of the investor; they are unreliable. 

Furthermore, to be a successful entrepreneur you don’t have to be a genius; you only have to be “smart enough.”  Success in entrepreneurship often is related simply to the amount of physical energy you can bring to bear. 

These take-aways are from an energetic presentation at the Boston ACG Breakfast Meeting on November 14^th presented by Diane Hessan, President and CEO of Communispace. 

In the approximate decade before Communispace was acquired by marketing giant Onmicom, the company (which provides “a focus group on steroids” for large companies with major brands, primarily through establishing online consumer communities) did several rounds of capital, survived the 2000-2001 technology bubble collapse, and changed its model from providing a “collaborative network space” for persons inside a company to establishing consumer communities to advise companies as to their product delivery. 

Hessan also spoke nostalgically of her first $10,000,000 raise in the year 2000, with a company at the time having annual revenues of only $10,000.  “I miss those days.” 

By the way, it is not altogether clear to me, for the right kind of internet idea, that those days have not returned.  The front page of the Thursday, November 14^th Wall Street Journal says that a two year old pre-revenue company named Snapchat just “spurned an all-cash offer from Facebook, Inc. for close to $3 billion. . . .”