We found out a couple of weeks ago that we’d been selected as a Red Herring 100 Europe winner, but we were given permission yesterday to make the honour public. All of the winners will celebrate the Red Herring 100 Awards with VCs, other investors and business development, strategy and marketing executives from the largest public technology companies at Red Herring’s Venture Market Europe conference in Cannes from March 25-27 at the InterContinental Carlton. The theme of this year’s event is “The Politics of Disruption”.

To be honest, I’m both excited and scared. This is the second such honour we’ve received, even though we haven’t publicly launched our website. The first was Innovate!Europe 2006, where we learned that we had to focus our product more and make it more international. We had to be both more and less ambitious — in other words, we had to be smarter about positioning ourselves in the international marketplace and not just be content to win a small piece of the Spanish market. We learned a lot about how VCs work and think, some of it good, some of it less pleasant. But all in all, it was a great experience, and our company would not be the same if we had not gone to Innovate!Europe 2006. (I think that Chris and her group are already accepting registrations for the 2007 version.)

That’s why I’m so excited about Red Herring. There’s no guarantee of funding, and in fact, it’s unlikely that anything will come directly from our attending the event. But the feedback is great, and you also get the chance to introduce yourself to influential players and investors. Both of these factors only increase the possibility that you might eventually have a product that makes an attractive investment. And it also helps to generate a bit of buzz for your product.

These events are also great, because you make great contacts with fellow entrepreneurs with promising projects. On the one hand, we will have the chance to learn from a lot of the other companies have already generated a lot of favourable buzz, such as Plazes.com, Lastfm, and Joost.

That being said, it seems that the competition this year was particularly tough, given that great projects like Panoramio that have generated a lot of favourable local buzz apparently did not win the final award. That decision really surprised me, because Panoramio is so well-regarded. Maybe the editors placed special emphasis on the business model? I really don’t know, particularly as I didn’t read the proposal that Panoramio submitted to the evaluation committee. And I didn’t get the hear the interview that they provided to the journalist that contacted them from Red Herring. But I think that their project is definitely a part of the Spanish web 2.0 vanguard, and maybe the full extent of that innovation was not adequately translated in the interview process.

All I can say is that we’re really excited to go to Cannes and be in the presence of some of these other companies and VCs. The list of European VCs that will be there is amazing: Accel Partners, Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, Espirit Capital Partners, Grupo Financiero Riva y Garcia, Index Ventures and Ventech. Plus Martin Varsavksy will be a keynote speaker, meaning that one of Spain’s most prominent and entertaining entrepreneurs will be present. (Riva y Garcia is the sole Spanish VC that will be represented.) Really, it’s a great chance to see and be seen, both locally and internationally, and we’ve already been given our presentation slot, which we’re very happy with. There are a lot of lunches and dinners planned, which is nice, as it will give us a lot of opportunities to network with potential investors.

And on top of it all, the staff at Red Herring has been very nice to us with all of our questions, etc.

We’re driving to the conference on Sunday morning to be there for the cocktail dinner on Sunday evening. I’ll keep you all updated on how the conference goes and about if we make any interesting contacts.

Congrats by the way to the three other Spanish companies that made the cut: BitRock, Agnitio SL and Openbravo ERP.

So I’m walking home after a night at the clubs with friends. It’s about 5AM, which means I left the clubs early. In Spain, the clubs close between 5:30 and 6:30, so I left before the club closed.

As I reach the block before mine, I’m approached by two white people. They look drunk. They try to speak to me in Spanish. “Donde esta Sepulveda?”

Me: “Excuse me? Are you British? Would you prefer to speak in English?” Let’s just say the accent and their features made me realise that they weren’t Spanish.

“Oh, thank God!” says the woman (about 30 years old) while giving me a big hug. “You speak English! You’re American, aren’t you?”

“Yes”, I answer. “Look, I’m going in that direction. I’ll show you where it is.” I only made this suggestion, because it was obvious that they were very drunk, and after explaining it twice, they still didn’t understand what I meant when I said it was only 1 block away.

So as we’re walking, a Spanish guy comes up to me and asks us all (in Spanish) for a cigarette. I’m the only one that understands him, and I happen to have cigarettes, so I give him one.

The girl looks at me kind of weird, turns to me and asks: “You’re not a drug dealer, are you?”

Apparently Marlboro Lights are now contraband.

I’m very annoyed. Playing the Good Samaritan to drunk tourists has its limits. I say: “Are you crazy? I went to Yale. My education cost $300.000. I didn’t bust my ass in school so that I could end up a common drug dealer.”

Her boyfriend, who is obviously a Ph.D. from Oxford, tells me: “Yeah, but if you spent so much on your education, that means that you need to pay it back. Maybe that’s why you’d need to sell drugs.”

My response: “The reason that you spend that amount of amount on your education is to have access to certain jobs–so that you have more options. My CV means that I can get a job paying me a decent salary without selling drugs. I have options, and I’ve done nothing to suggest that I sell drugs.”

The drunk girlfriend, obviously inspired by my indignant response: “You’re so precocious”

Me: “I don’t think you’re using that word correctly.” I walk with them to the street that they were asking for and then wish them a good night, still smiling and trying not to be too annoyed. I feel like the black yuppie guy in the movie “Crash”.

The drunk girlfriend gives me a hug.

I leave, annoyed to have a very fun night ruined by a well-intentioned, but drunk and ignorant tourist asking for directions and finding a way to stereotype me as she gives me a hug and assumes I’m a drug dealer with either a heart of gold or a built-in GPS system. It’s obvious they weren’t threatened by me–the girlfriend hugged me 4 times. But that didn’t mean that they couldn’t find a way to try to assert their racial superiority as they asked for my help. Maybe the next time I’ll just tell drunk British tourists to piss off, rather than trying to help them get home. I don’t need this. Sometimes being an asshole helps you avoid being pissed off. Say what you will about Spanish people, but in 7 years here, it took a couple of drunk Brits to assume that I was a well-intentioned drug dealer looking to help them find their way back to their hotel. If I were a drug dealer, would I really have taken the time out of my drug-dealing schedule to walk them to their block rather than service my clients? And if they really thought I was a drug dealer, why were they hugging me and following me? I just don’t get it. Sometimes racism is so ingrained that its subconconscious manifestion simply doesn’t make sense in the conscious world, not that it ever makes much sense . . . .

The Spanish newspaper El Pais is reporting that Google Spain “only” earned €1.8 million in 2005, for a profit of €96,000, up 83% from 2004 when Google Spain had profits of €52,827. Turnover was up 49% relative to 2004, when sales totaled €1,222,000. Google opened its Spanish subsidiary in 2003, with turnover of €291,319 and a profit of €5,445.

What’s surprising is that Google’s search engine has at least a 90% market share, according to Nielsen/Netratings. One would expect that Google would earn substantially more money than Idealista and Infojobs, but according to these official results, Google Spain is a mediocre Internet start-up.

El Pais notes that analysts estimate that Google dominates 75% of the Spanish online ad marketing. In 2005, the total value of this market was €120.5 million, which would mean that Google Spain should have earned about €90 million, not the €1.8 million suggested by the registered annual accounts. Another interesting note is that last year Google Spain made a big deal last year about inaugurating cool new offices in the Torre Picasso in Madrid with capacity for 130 employees. But the official accounts only account for 10 employees, who have an aggregate salary of €953,845, up 57.5% from 2004, when the aggregate salary was €605,597. And it appears that Google Spain has not officially hired anyone over the last two years.

One can only assume that this is just another case of creative accounting with very little basis in reality . . . . the case of a corporate parent boosting its bottomline without the money passing through the local subsidiaries.

As I prepare to attend another conference with Goa Internet Services, I can’t help but remember the very bad-tasting experience that we had last year at Innovate!Europe ‘06. First of all, I must say that Chris Shipley is one of the nicest, most honest and straightforward people that I’ve met in this sector. Chris and her team did a great job with Innovate!Europe ‘06, and the event itself provided us with much needed feedback about our strategy and our product. We learned that we had a great product, but we also learned that perhaps the product could be optimised if we changed our approach and focused more on the international marketplace. We honestly wouldn’t be the company that we are now if we hadn’t attended Innovate!Europe ‘06.

When we got to the conference we were really excited to meet one VC that marketed itself as Skype’s original investor. Before the conference, we thought about how cool it’d be to meet them, and at the conference we got really excited when the PR rep told us after our presentation that this important VC wanted to meet us. The VC rep questioned us for about 1 hour about every aspect of our business, and as dumb, eager entrepreneurs in that moment, we gave him a lot of information about our company and our strategy. We had specifically asked the rep if the VC had a competing company, to which he had responded no. At the dinner that night, Chris and her team announced that the VC had just informed them that they were going to invest in a Barcelona-based company focused on a vertical search engine for property. We got so excited, imagining our surprise Hollywood ending until we saw the rep with whom we’d been chatting patting another young entrepreneur who hadn’t even attended the conference on the back. The VC’s rep had simply used the conference as a press op (meaning that this had been planned well in advance–we later noted that the new company was already included on the company’s website as belonging to its portfolio of companies; we hadn’t noticed earlier because the description of the portfolio company had been pretty limited) and had simply pretended to be interested in us so as to collect information about our plans. After the conference, I sent the VC rep an email and he never even responded, despite apologizing to me the day after the conference for any “misunderstandings” that might have taken place given the embarrassment of the night before (by that point, everyone at the conference knew that we were the only vertical search engine officially registered at the event and many people had come up afterwards to express their condolences.) He told me that he hoped I didn’t think he was an asshole, and on the bright side, he had given us a lot of valuable feedback.

As we prepare for this new event, I can’t help but wonder: how much information should we give to a VC that is supposedly interested in our product? VCs officially note that they won’t signed NDAs or any other such agreement, which means that the entrepreneur’s only protection depends on: i) his own discretion; and ii) the VC’s good faith. On the one hand, you want to “sell” your product and highlight the interesting opportunity that your product represents. On the other hand, it seems that some VCs are less than fully honest and in some cases, borderline unethical.

After my experience last year, I will try to be more vigilant to protect ourselves from giving away too much information to the VC (and by extension, to the VC’s portfolio company), even as the VC peppers me with questions as to why he should invest in our product and as to what our strategy is going forward.

Day 2 at OJObuscador was quite different from Day 1, which was all about the search engines and what they have planned for 2007. Day 2 was all about i) organic positioning; ii) marketing online; and iii) i.r. / usability. I generally found the Day 2 conferences to be informative but lower on the “wow” factor.

My general impressions:

• Javi Casares seems to always be in a good mood, even as he is running a pressure-filled conference with hundreds of attendees. That’s to be commended, as was the quality of the OJObuscador conference.
• The SEO/SEM market in Spain is in a very early state of development, and neither Spanish companies nor Spanish users are pressuring SEOs to improve. Spanish companies are generally waking up to the marketing opportunities presented by the Internet, but they are more accustomed to SEM-type approaches (a fixed budget for short-term results) than to SEO (optimizing a site for mid-to-long term benefit). But even if an SEM approach is chosen, a lot of companies might waste money on overly simplistic SEM campaigns that fail to monitor actively the campaign’s return on investment (ROI) or otherwise track the campaign’s success. So Google gets rich, but maybe your company doesn’t get the exposure it needs/deserves/has paid to get. On the other hand, Spanish users are not as demanding as users in other countries, which means that in general the Spanish SEO/SEM market is not as dynamic and professional as it could be–the bar is a lot lower.
• The best way to guarantee an SEO/SEM’s ability to hit your targets is to request a list of past sites on which he or she has worked. Otherwise, you might pay someone a lot of $$ but not get useful results.
• If you ever want to hire an SEO/SEM specialist, do a search and see how prominently the specialist shows up in various search engines. A supposed SEO/SEM expert should know how to be listed on the first page of Google and the other major search engines. If your expert doesn’t rank properly, ditch him.

I am surprised by how useful I’m finding the Ojobuscador conference. Based on the reactions of the Spanish blogging community, I expected it to be interesting, but I am still pleasantly surprised. A lot of networking events have little content and present few real opportunities to do more than collect a few business cards. I don’t think that Ojobuscador’s primary draw is networking, at least for me or for migoa. There are a lot of SEOs here (no investors or traditional press from what I can tell). But Ojobuscador presents a unique opportunity to get a snapshot of what’s going on in the Spanish (European??) search market. In short, I’m not sure how much networking we’ve done, but I think that we’ve learned a lot and met some interesting people that might lead to interesting strategic alliances further down the road. Maybe we’ll even be able to announce something soon . . . .

In terms of the specific presentations, my impressions from the conference are the following:

• If, as Google says, the number of times that someone refers to you indicates your importance, then Google is the undisputed winner in the conference. Although the Google presentation itself was among my least favourite (I guess they have the least to prove and thus don’t need to work that hard to convince us to use their product), it was clear that all of the other presenters considered themselves also-rans.
  • Miguel Acosta of Ask.Com introduced some new features but in general I didn’t get the impression that they think of themselves as Google’s direct competition, and I was surprised when he noted that Ask doesn’t have an advertising platform in Europe because of an agreement with Google. In general, no one else in the conference referenced Ask in their comments. As the first presentation of the morning, I think everyone was pretty much still waking up, though there was a generally positive response to AskX, which hopefully will launch very soon in Spain. It’s tough taking Google on directly, but like the other major search engines Ask has a lot of $$ behind it (IAC). And Ask has its own billionaire CEO in the form of Barry Diller, a very experienced, very well-regarded and very well paid (the highest paid executive in the US of 2005) CEO. Diller bought Ask in 2005 for $1.85 billion (famously removing Jeeves, the butler that previously served as the search engine’s image), so there’s still time to see what Ask can accomplish as part of an important Internet conglomerate that includes Bloglines, Expedia.com and Match.com. Still it’s a tough task taking on Google. The message: We’re cool too, even though we’re been flying under the radar for a while. Give us a chance! We’re new, improved and under new management!
  • Steve Crossan of Google presented a few new features for webmasters (google.es/webmastertools and www.google.com/websiteoptimizer) to help users determine if their site is performing and generally to provide information that might help you optimise your site and to figure out which versions of your website might have more success (almost like de facto online focus groups). Google really didn’t reference any other search engines. It was a pretty straightforward presentation without any bells and whistles. The message: We’re the best, we know it and we don’t have anything to prove. If you want us to help you get even more traffic, here are a couple more tools that you might use.
  • Ismael El-Qudsi of Windows Live was the first speaker to try to get the audience involved and his presentation in itself was probably one of the most entertaining of the conference so far, in terms of audience interaction. (And having spoken with Ismael during the rest of the conference, I can tell you that he is a genuinely nice, approachable and fun guy.) He presented a list of new features that Microsoft has or will introduce to show that their technology is better than Google’s. There were constant references to Google, including the comment that Window’s Live is 50% faster than Google, because it’s easier to type 4 letters (l-i-v-e) than it is to type 6 letter (g-o-o-g-l-e). There was no real unifying theme to the presentation, other than that Microsoft has a lot of cool stuff that Microsoft claims works better than Google’s. (It seem to be working. Oscar Baeza of GenBeta calls Microsoft Live’s Photosynth “absolutely amazing”!) It’s clear that Microsoft is on the attack, even more than Yahoo. The presentation was aggressively pro-Microsoft (anti-Google??), including a banner on Ismael’s messenger stating “Don’t Be Evil! Be Live!” (a play on Google’s “Don’t Be Evil! slogan). The message: We know that Google is kicking our ass, but we have a lot of $$, we’re ready to fight and we are using our ample resources to develop technology that is better than Google’s in various areas (e.g., maps, user interface, gadgets, etc.). If you give us a shot, you won’t be disappointed. Remember: We’re Microsoft! You like us!
    
  • François Bourdoncle of Exalead (a French search start-up that launched in October 2006) was probably my favourite speaker of the event. He was an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur with a keen sense of his competition and typical French flair. He started out noting that everyone wants to be the Internet’s operating system but that there were two clear approaches: i) Google’s model, which is clean and simple; and ii) Microsoft’s model, which is based on its success as the operating system of the PC market, and which is more of a laundry list of features than a simple, clean model. He clearly identified with the Google model (I guess winners have a lot of friends) and noted that Exalead was betting on Google’s approach. He noted that Exalead was involved with Quareo (the French-German search engine) and that there was still a lot of room for improvement in search. François worked for Altavista in the 1990s and he remembered that everyone there thought that the search issue had been solved; they’d had no fear of Google or any other search competitor. If I understood him correctly, the former CEO of Altavista now works for Google. The message: We know we’re never going to beat Google. But there’s still a lot to improve in search. And in any case, we want to be the “Apple” of search engines with a clear niche and a loyal (though smaller) user base. Help us build our traffic!
  • Salim Mitha of Yahoo gave the final presentation of the big search engines. He seemed like a really nice guy and transmits earnestness and likability. He talked a lot about the limits of algorithmic search, about how the Internet foments the rise of self-made authors, photographers, deejays and directors–that is, of user-generated content and about the rise of social search. He noted that search engines probably only access currently 0.0057% of the possible information that could exist. He also suggested that the future of search is in “transactional” search, meaning the possibility to access subjective information like “what is the best restaurant in Barcelona?” or “what are the 10 coolest clubs in London”? The message: Social search is the future of the web, or at the very least a very big opportunity, and Yahoo is particularly well positioned to dominate here. Don’t count us out. Remember, we have 500 million daily users!

• One general theme was that everyone was focused on offering personalized search options, suggesting the move from the “personal computer” to the “personal Internet” and/or “personalised search” is a fait accompli.
• The main presentation after lunch was a round-table with the big search engines talking about the state of the current search market. Nothing really new was said here. The most interesting facts came from Gustavo Núñez from Nielsen//NetRatings, who presented a range of interesting facts about the search market in Europe and worldwide, including the fact that France and Spain are the quickest growing search markets. If we’re lucky, his presentation will be posted on OJObuscador’s website. It was also interesting to see Samuel Arenas of Ask and Ismael El-Qudsi of Windows Live attempting to convince the audience that the best way to improve their search experience was to try various search engines given that each search engine has its own algorithm and thus might generate results that other search engines might miss. (Google didn’t encourage anyone else to try various search engines to generate better results.) Both also noted that they are open to collaborations. Bernardo Hernández of Google didn’t really say much other than agreeing with Ismael that it’s the search engine’s responsibility to improve the user experience and figure out what the user wants and needs (and not the user’s responsibility to figure out how to search better). This tied in nicely with his earlier comment that Google’s dominance is tied to fact that its users are loyal and satisfied with its product, which means that they feel no need to try any other product.

I’ve been getting into a new series called Heroes that’s getting a lot of attention in the US. It’s like XMen but without the costumes. The idea is that these mutants are a bunch of ordinary people that discover that they have superpowers, and they need to get together to save the world from destruction.

One of my favourite characters is Peter Petrelli. When you meet him, you realise that he’s the kind of guy that puts everyone else’s needs before his. He works as a male nurse and seems focused on helping anyone who needs him. His older brother, Nathan, is the over-achieving, selfish, polished politician who their mother describes as the alpha male. Whereas Peter seems like he can hardly pay the bills, Nathan can literally fly.

At one point in an early episode, Nathan and Peter’s mother tells Peter that he needs to stop letting Nathan walk all over him, and that, in general, he needs to start putting himself first. That if he doesn’t take care of himself, no one else will. That he needs to be a little bit more selfish. In her words, “when you put everyone else first, you end up last.” It’s an interesting variation of the common “good guys finish last” theme.

Being a comic book story where the “loser” guys always have alter egos that are powerful superheroes, we soon discover that Peter is, in fact, one of the most powerful mutants on the show. He’s an empath, which means that his profound empathetic abilities allow him to coopt the powers of any other superhero just by thinking about the person. And the show hints that at some point Peter becomes the leader of the world, or at least of the mutants–kind of like Charles Xavier in the Xmen.

The show is really cool, but the line stuck with me, as last week we were negotiating with a business angel about his entry into the shareholding of Goa Internet Services. At the same time, my business partner and I had to make some important strategic decisions about the company’s future. And in such situations I always find myself wondering what’s the best strategy: Cold-blooded lawyer? Or friendly salesperson? Good cop? Or bad cop? Peter? Or Nathan? A lot depends on your negotiating power in a particular situation and on who the other party is. Probably a mixture of the two strategies is the best bet. The key is that you have to be able to read the situation. You need to be a bit of an empath, I suppose.

But if there’s anything I’ve learned over the last three years of being an entrepreneur it’s that, in business, you need to put yourself and your business first. It’s great if we can all end up friends, but that can’t be the priority. A business is not a social club. Sometimes you need to fire really nice people. Sometimes business partners end up not being complementary. And sometimes your best/most powerful ally is someone with whom you’d rather not have dinner. Learn to compromise, but never forget that your utmost priority is to protect your interests. Because you can be sure that the other party–whether your employees, your business partners, the banks, your investors, the government,etc.–are all putting their interests ahead of yours. And a lot of “friends” tend to disappear once the going gets tough. Good guys might turn out to be superheroes in comic books, but the real world is a bit more complicated. Be a little bit selfish. Think about yourself and your business first. And get it in writing if you can.

Is death a prerequisite to a happy ending? But if you’re dead, maybe that’s not such a happy ending, is it?

I guess my question is: When do you know that a story–or at least a chapter of your life–has ended? I’ve found that this question can apply equally to one’s personal life (when do you know that a relationship isn’t working out?) and to the life of a business as well. With my first start-up, I often wondered: When is it time to call it quits? Or is this just the dramatic climax before getting to the eventual happy ending? Hindsight is always 20-20, as we say in the US, but is hindsight is a prerequisite to being able to analyse and understand your personal story? Maybe I just need a really good therapist.

One of my favourite happy ending movies of all time is “Pretty Woman”. But who knows what happens after Julia Roberts “rescues” Richard Gere? Maybe 3 months later he finds a hot intern who also has a heart of gold but without such a suspect past. Maybe she finds out she had some sort of life-threatening sexual disease spawned from her time in the backseats of so many cars.

My life has been a series of happy endings followed by unforeseen complicating details:

• I got into Yale College thinking that it was the logical result of my hard work in high school, and that the mission was accomplished, but then I realised that the real hard work had only just begun and now the mission was to get into Yale Law School.
• I got into Yale Law School and then realised that nothing that I had done before mattered other than as preparation, because the real goal was to get onto law journal, and then to get to be executive editor, and then to get an appeals court clerkship, and then to get a Supreme Court clerkship, and then to become a professor at an Ivy League law school, and then to become the most published and famous law professor of all time, and then . . . .

This explains a large part of why I left the US. We’re a country of deferred gratification, whereas Europeans seem more focused on living for today. One of my best friends in law school was a Rhodes Scholar, one of the most brilliant students there with killer recommendations from the top professors, a brilliant career as a law school professor ahead of her and job offers from Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. All of this being a black, Jamaican woman with a very thick accent. From her perspective, she got “off-track” when she didn’t get the Supreme Court clerkship. She became borderline suicidal. She was so obsessed with achieving her goal that her fiance ended up leaving her, because the thought of marrying him was not enough to satisfy her, and he didn’t want to marry someone like that. Achieving a desired professional milestone was much more important than personal fulfillment and more important than her supposed life partner.

I realised at that moment that I didn’t want to go down that road. Professional success is important, but there are other things that are more important in life. That’s when I decided that I was going to Europe–the land of living for today. At Yale Law School, they’d promised that it was time to “get off the treadmill”. That we’d finally arrived. That we’d no longer need to continue the hyper-competitive tendencies that had taken us to the summit of American legal education. And as a token of good faith, they’d told us that there were no grades. Just pass or fail (and of course, for exceptional efforts, honours). The weird thing is that the lack of grades just made us more competitive and we simply found new ways to validate our superiority relative to our peers, to the extent that things life a judicial clerkship and law journal became literally a matter of life-and-death (even though anyYale Law graduate will get a job at 95% of the top US law firms–and thus a starting salary of $150.000 plus bonus–without either a clerkship or law journal being a prerequisite).

In Spain, let’s just say that I don’t have this problem of a hypercompetitive environment. As my fellow expats and I often muse, we love Europe, because here people “work to live” rather than “live to work”. I have become an avid skier, have done lots of wine tasting, have travelled a lot, made a lot of friends, don’t mind a good party, spend lots of time at the beach and walking in the city . . . . Life is much more relaxed and personally fulfilling here, but as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, this comes at the cost of a more competitive economy and thus professional opportunities. Having a nation of citizens who believe that professional success is a matter of life-and-death really boosts productivity. Having a nation of people who don’t value success as much leads to a relatively happy population, but not so much productivity. I’m sure there’s a better balance to be found, but I haven’t found it in any of my travels.

More recently, I started to think about happy endings when my company, Goa Internet Services, was selected by a group of editors as one of the 100 most innovative companies in Europe. Within a few weeks, we’ll be off to the French Riviera to network with international venture capitalists, press and other entrepreneurs. We know that it’s no guarantee of VC-funding, but I was still really, really excited about the honour . . . until they sent the pro forma invoice telling us how much it would cost to attend. Once again, a happy ending with unforeseen strings attached. A new chapter begins . . . .