Visiting http://www.masvf.com/forums/index.php allows one to visit the Minnesota Business and Technology Forums and observe what is available.  However, in order to become a member of the community, one must register.  Registration is simple and has several advantages.  First, you can search for other members in the community using names, IDs and keywords related to industries.  Second, you can identify yourself to the community through the use of keywords and interests.  Third, you can subscribe to certain "threads" and receive email when these threads experience activity.  You may also unsubscribe from any thread at any time.  Fourth, you can post to the Forums.  This is extremely powerful.  Members can post their opinions, information and engage in online discussions.  Jobs can be posted.  Events can be posted.

NetSuds encourages members to choose usernames which readily identify one's self to the community.  For example, the username "johnsmith" identifies the member as John Smith (or at least we hope!).  Use of IDs to hide one's identity is not encouraged in these Forums.  Remember, this is a professional Web Forum and not some adolescent, rumor-spreading chatroom.

Even after you register you can alter your user profile in the "CP" section along the top of the Forum webpage.

4.2   Step Into The Future

4.4   Martin, Ebbers, and the Future of Telecom

George Gilder (04/28/05): In recent years in this space, I have celebrated Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom and called for the resignation of Kevin Martin as a menace to the U.S. economy. 

Hey, you can’t win them all. But you can learn from your mistakes. Martin today is espousing deregulation as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and Ebbers is going to jail for accounting fraud. 

Yet despite Ebbers’ subsequent offenses and Martin’s apparent conversion, I regret neither my tributes to Ebbers nor my critique of Martin and his positions.  

Beginning with the arachnoid regimes of William Kinnard and Reid Hundt in the 1990s, Washington’s regulatory spiders gummed up with government the world wide web of Internet communications. In his impromptu alliance with the Democrats on the FCC, Martin extended the Clinton Administration’s regulatory regime into the new century despite deregulatory efforts by Congress and the Courts.  

In the process, the regulators in Washington and the states have inflicted far more damage on telecom and the U.S. economy than Ebbers ever did. Their huge policy mistakes caused some 1000 bankruptcies in telecom related companies, dissolved two trillion dollars of market cap, fostered a 78 percent rise in telecom lawyers, and displaced the U.S. as world Internet champion. The U.S. today commands only one fortieth the bandwidth per capita of South Korea, perhaps one tenth the bandwidth per capita of Japan, and roughly one-tenth Korea’s share of GDP transacted on the Internet.  

Now amid contradictory words about enforcing “a level playing field” through the FCC, Martin early this month told a Cable Industry trade show in San Francisco that he preferred to act in “a deregulatory, not a regulatory fashion.” He had better be serious. Continuation of the previous Martin medley of regulation as usual will perpetuate the telecom doldrums and cripple U.S. competitiveness.  

For all his sins, Ebbers is as much a scapegoat for chaotic regulations as a perpetrator of accounting crimes. Existing telecom rules interact with the tax system in a combinatorial explosion of complexity that puts the accountants and lawyers in charge and makes the entire industry always guilty of something. In telecom, “capitalizing costs,” as Ebbers has learned, is indeed a crime, except that under the law all telcos are still mandated to capitalize costs every day, slowly depreciating rapidly-obsolescent switches and computers over 20 or 30 years and even, under averaging requirements, writing off cars and office equipment over decades. That way, as wards of government, the telcos pretend to be profitable when they are actually consuming capital.  

Ebbers is also charged with an alleged Worldcom “lie” that Internet traffic was doubling every 100 days. It did grow nearly that fast for a while between 1995 and 1997, particularly at Worldcom’s UUNet. But the numbers were always elusive, and we discounted them at the Gilder Technology Report. Future traffic growth always depended upon rapid deployment of broadband connections to homes and offices. What brought the growth to a halt was the strangulation of broadband with regulations …

Read George Gilder’s complete article in the News & Updates section on: http://www.gildertech.com/

By Howard Anderson June 2005

[Howard Anderson is the William Porter Distinguished Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management, where he teaches courses on early-stage companies. He founded the Yankee Group and cofounded YankeeTek Ventures and Battery Ventures. He plans to raise no new monies for his venture funds.]

Good-bye! We venture capitalists like to think of ourselves as giants striding across the technology landscape, showering money on terrific young entrepreneurs, adding value, creating jobs, nurturing real companies. We are financial samurai. But I am giving it up. Why?

First, technology supply is bloated. Innovation is not dead, but demand for new technologies is moribund and will continue to be weak for at least the next five years. During the boom times, VCs financed more than 5,000 new companies a year in information technology, communications, biotechnology, and the Internet. The problem is that the buyers of new technology cannot possibly utilize all this stuff. There is a very real limit to what can usefully be deployed. IT and communications spending is no longer growing at 15 percent per year; growth will be in the middle single digits for at least the next five years. Therefore, few software and communications companies will enjoy the double-digit growth that inflames company valuations and makes VCs rich.

Second, there's a good reason why technology spending is stagnant. The hype machine is broken. For years, technologists told the world that "information is strategic"; we said that if companies didn't overspend to protect against Y2K they were committing corporate hara-kiri. Executives spent like crazy people. No longer. Their new mantra: spend no more than last year.

Third, the financial markets for technology companies are no longer exuberantly irrational. VCs hate rational markets: rational markets value companies at two and a half times their sales at an initial public offering or one and a half times their sales at a merger. We need a little irrationality to earn a living--but the total capitalization for the leading technology companies is now one-sixth of what it was five years ago.

Fourth, these changes in venture funding are structural, not cyclical. VCs actually like cyclical markets; we can buy in cheaply and wait for exuberance to bail us out. Traditionally, we knew that if we picked the right sector we could make 10 times our money. In fact, we knew if we picked the best two or three companies in that sector, we could make 50 times our money--but you get my point. But those days are, regrettably, over.

Here's why: it takes about $30 million to get a startup software company to break even -- and even great software companies rarely grow more than 100 percent a year. In irrational times, a software company with $30 million in sales would have been worth $180 million, or 600 percent of a VC's investment. Which is good, but not great. Unfortunately, in rational times, the company would be worth $47 million to the investors, or only 157 percent of their investment. But that's over five years! Per year, it's a return of only 11 percent--and that's for a winner. Remember: in venture funds, only 20 percent of investments are winners. Forty percent are in the middle, 20 percent are losers, and another 20 percent are write-offs.

Venture funds all strive to rank in the top quartile. But the returns of the top-quartile funds depend on when they were launched. Take a look at these numbers for venture capital returns from Cambridge Associates:

Year     Percentage increase

1984     12.9

1988     22.7

1994     49.6

1997     67.5

1999     -8.7

2000     -8.3

If you were a VC between 1994 and 1997, you couldn't help but make money. But by 2000, you were underwater.

Finally, it's not just supply of new technology that is too abundant. Ten years ago there were 240 member firms in the National Venture Capital Association. Today, that membership has nearly doubled, and our fund size under management has increased eightfold. There's too much venture money pursuing too many deals. There's nowhere for all that money to go: we can't spend the money we've raised.

Venture capitalists view themselves as pragmatists, but if they think the dynamics of the business haven't changed, they're as self-deluding as the next person.

Ever wonder what we did for a living in early-stage venture funding? I bet you think we spent the day searching for the next insanely great company. But we spent most of our lives in endless meetings with people who were lying to us: scientists who swore that their patents were solid and entrepreneurs who insisted that they had no competition. We lied right back at them: said our money was different.

That was the old way, and it was tons of fun, and we all made too much money. I'll miss it. But now the markets are too rational, and the returns are too small and uncertain. So, time to leave.

Purpose  CEOs need resources to assist them in executing their duties and leading their companies.  Boards of Directors and upper management are not always the best or most independent resources upon which to draw.  The CEO Roundtable exists to provide CEOs with an independent resource of wisdom and shared experience.  Your key 'take-aways' from the Roundtable will be accelerated learning - so as to avoid common and uncommon pitfalls -, an expanded network of advisors and colleagues and tools to enhance the productivity and value of your enterprise.

Content  First, networking among the CEO members of a Roundtable is the best and richest content.  Second, the Roundtable facilitator will schedule subject matter experts of interest to the CEOs.  Examples include intellectual property, branding, sales, engineering, marketing, finance, compensation, human resources, M&A, etc. 

Format  Meetings will consist primarily of 2 elements.  First, "content" will be presented and discussed.  Second, "discussion" of common problems and solutions will take place.  The facilitator will lead both elements or assign elements to certain CEOs.

Confidentiality  Roundtable meetings are completely confidential.  Nothing said in a roundtable discussion, short of illegal activity, leaves the meeting.  This allows each CEO to feel comfortable discussing issues and subjects he may not feel comfortable speaking about with others.