Pittsburgh Ventures

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Cleveland at a conference of seed-stage investors from across the U.S.   For me, the high point of the conference was undoubtedly the keynote speech by David Wilhelm, founder of Adena Ventures in Athens, OH.   The central storyline of his remarks seemed to be the following:

1. The current financial crisis is the result of a system that rewarded financial creativity over entrepreneurship;
2. Entrepreneurs are what made this Country great, and the solution for the Nation’s economic crisis is to refocus our collective efforts (and funding) toward encouraging entrepreneurship; and
3. For entrepreneurs and seed-stage investors, the coming increase in attention may be the silver lining in the current financial cloud.

He also talks about the difference between “Private Equity” and “Venture Capital” (especially seed-stage), and makes an interesting argument that the big private equity funds have been hiding behind the skirts of their much smaller and more risk-tolerant VC brethren.    [I'm not brave enough to comment on that one]

I highly recommend reading the entire speech, posted here.