Yesterday was the first of the CCTO’s summer workshop series. The event was hosted by Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR), one of the top legal firms in Silicon Valley. The event started at 5 PM with a reception for all the finalists. This event was also an opportunity to meet the mentors assigned to each team by the CCTO as well as representatives from various angel investment groups. Our mentor, Ed Harley, also happens to be an angel investor with the Keiretsu Forum. As a starting point, Ed gave us a copy of a series of 3 articles he wrote as an open letter to software entrepreneurs called “How Software Entrepreneurs can be Successful Presenters to Investors” [Microsoft Word document]. It’s a very informative article about what an Angel Investor expects from a business pitch. He is very knowledgeable about what it takes to get funding, so I think he will be very beneficial to our business plan and pitch development.

At 6:45 PM, we started the workshop. The first part of the workshop was Business Plan Essentials presented by Dave Weinerth, the Director of Business Development at PARC. Dave had also presented at the Executive Summary Workshop back in June, so some of the information was similar. He covered the main sections of the business plan as well as some of the criteria for the CCTO submission. For example, the business plan can be no more than 20 pages with up to 5 pages of appendices. He also went over some useful processes intended to help gather and formulate the data needed to generate the plan. Some of the sections will be covered in more detail at later workshops.

After a short break, we resumed the workshop with a presentation on Sustainability Metrics by George Basile, PhD. George had also presented at the Executive Summary Workshop but went into a lot more detail this time. He provided a lot of tools to analyze various aspects of a business with respect to sustainability. The main point was to consider a more expanded system with regard to the product life cycle. Rather than the typical supplier-company-customer chain, he also showed how we need to consider the biosphere (atmosphere, environment, etc.), lithosphere (such as the elements like oil we remove from the earth) and the community (other people affected by our company). He pointed us to some books as well, such as Natural Capitalism, The Natural Step, and Cradle to Cradle. It is going to be very interesting to see how sustainable we will be able to make Aptility.

By 9 PM we were all pretty well burned out. It looks like Nate and I have a lot of work to do on the business plan, especially in the sustainability area.