3 ) Tasks and duties during my internship

 

The company's structure is very light, there is no full time employee but all year long one or two interns, and part of the work is done by subcontractors, which are experts in their area, such as Lawyers, Technical Advisors, Service Providers, Valuation Companies, Brokers… The success of the Company only comes from the Manager, Didier Perez, who is French and lives in the Bay Area for more than 20 years with a financial background, and a light structure is his answer to a fast moving environment.

In that frame, interns are a support to daily activity for the whole entity of the Company, the smaller the Company is, the biggest the intern’s role is important.

I have been especially working on the following aspects:

 a)      Business Plan and Executive Summary analysis:

The company receives 1 to 5 business plans a week thanks to the Manager relationships, the positioning of the Company regarding other Venture Capitalists (VCs) or Funds that send a deal flow that is not in their investments focus and through agreements with local organizations. Its role is to lead a due diligence on the companies that send their file. Inoventures is also a great value added services provider for French entrepreneurs coming to the Silicon Valley.

I had to make a first lecture of the business plan to find out if it compiles with the investment strategy according to the following points :

-         What is the size of the Founder’s dream?

-         Is the market over a billion dollars?

-         Are Founders ready to work 18 hours a day?

-         Is the business plan realistic?

-         Is the return on investment over 500% in 2 years?

 

I had to analysis the business regarding the following criteria:

-         product / service

-         market

-         financial projections

-         competition analysis

-         management team.

(see an example in appendix)

 

After that first selection, and for then retained projects, the process was to go deeper into the financial projections by:

-         checking the market evaluation figures with informational websites (see free internet sources in appendix)

-         building our own spreadsheet with Excel to verify the calculation

-         change the variables to test different hypotheses of market penetration, time to market or sales prices.

 

Meetings with the Founders of the Company allow to get a better idea on the business : the investment decision is mainly motivated by a team, before that a project or an idea. Successful Companies always have a top team.

 

b)      Topics studied during the internship

 

The company is focusing on Telecommunication, web infrastructure and web services, and Healthcare. I had the chance to study the following topics:

-         Website

3 components for a good website: content, community, commerce

All of them integrated and many links and a marketing for each one.

 

Have an identity crisis:

 

-         at what stage do you make money?

-         identify the most important agents in the sector and look at their website

-         create an alliance through a site for all the agents.

 

So there are two main things:

 

-         control the money

-         locate the agents.

 

-         Infomediary

 

New law will prevent companies to sell data about people without paying the concerned persons for it. It will be more and more difficult to sell this information to advertisers without paying anything.

 

This is why infomediary is growing. The principle is to pay people to obtain the data they agree to give. But it becomes taxable income.

 

Some Companies propose to let you free to give 80% of the earnings they made with your data to the Foundation you want.

 

-         The Vortal

 

A vortal is improved on the concept of the standard portal site (Yahoo!) by implementing a custom designed vertical search engine.  The term "vertical" refers to the engine's ability to query a database full of information specific to a topic. 

 

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