Thursday, October 15, 2009

We won the NWEN First Look Forum!

Amidst a room of 50 - 60 of the Northwest's best Angel networks and VC firms, Jamen knocked it out of the park with two great presentations yesterday!

The format was this. After getting accepted into the First Look Forum, an annual group screening put on by the Northwest Entrepenuers Network (NWEN), 50 companies were screened and whittled down to a burly 12 company group. These 12 would then get whittled down to 5 companies and then of course one holy winner ;).

This group of 12 got further screening and then yesterday all of the companies got a chance to give a 3 minute presentation to the room. This was a pretty awesome thing to see. All of the companies there had great presentations that were concise, well thought and were addressing a serious problem. But after seeing Jamen give his energetic and beautiful presentation (ahem grossly obvious self pat on my back), I was confident we would get through to the final 5.

Sure enough, we got the chance to give our 10 minute presentation and this is where things got hairy. Jamen did a fine job of speaking to all of the slides he got through but ended up leaving a few slides unseen. But even without those slides, the Investors thought that Findood had the most compelling problem and awarded us the winner!

So what did we win? By far the coolest thing we got from this experience was exposure to all of these awesome Investors. But aside from that we get a whole bunch of services, free screenings to Alliance of Angels, Kerietsu and Zino Society. And to top it, off we get a free year of office space and some awesome furniture from WRF Capital and Working Spaces.

After a long year of ups and downs Findood has finally been recognized for all of it's hard work. It is a long road forward, but this is quite a nice pit stop.

Thanks to NWEN for this experience and all of the people who voted for us. Also thanks to TechFlash for the nice article here.

Back to work!