As many people already know, one of the original bloggers in the tech blogosphere (no its not Arrington of Techcrunch . . . earlier by 2 years atleast ) Jeff Nolan has left SAP Ventures and joined Teqlo as the CEO. Jeff’s latest post is about honing the “positioning” statement for VC’s. The comment section is really interesting with everyone constructively helping to improve the statement.

Truth be told, it was quite ironic to see Jeff having to struggle through this having been on the other side for quite a while as a VC . . . ( one of my VC’s in fact) . . . This is a very hard task especially for Teqlo because they are not an application company, but a enabling infratructure with a end user utility (wow, a hybrid) . The so called “killer app” or killer mashup borne out of Teqlo is probably something that has yet to be imagined (but that too is the upside of the Teqlo, that its value proposition is only limited by the imagination of the community it builts). Jotspot (not competitive but structurally similar company) tried to solve this problem by building a few example applications along with the launch of its infrastructure . . . to not only stir the imagination but provide value at launch.

Zoli Erdos has very good advice . . .

Of course your statement about describes what Teqlo is … i.e the statement is true, it fits the business … but …. does it describe Teqlo specifically?

To paraphrase . . . start with the end user and the “why’s” and end with “how” the product can serve that end user UNIQUELY, SPECIFICALLY, and BETTER. (easier said than done ofcourse!)

A few other random things to think about when putting together the “positining statement”

1. Entrepreneurs and “intra-preneurs” faces similar hurdles in getting resources for a project/venture

2. First 3 minute of VC’s or a senior exec’s time (if you are pitching an internal project) is when you hook or fail to hook him/her. Make sure you have something catchy (and important) to say.

3. It is the external version of the internal mission statement (which aligns the company and helps with resources allocation . . . ROI Metrics + Strategy + Mission = prioritization)

4. VC’s are not as technical as they claim to be . . . dumb it down for the VC’s . . . if they like the pitch they will find a “venture partner” to do more DD . . . at which time you will have plenty of time to white board out EVERTHING . . .

5. Investments pan or dont pan out usually in 3-5 years. In the mean time, VC’s needs your help bragging his latest pet investment to his country club buddies . . . the positioning statement needs to be catchy enough to impress his foursome like a 325 yard drive off the first tee.

6. It serves as the first sentence of the boiler plate at the end of every press release. And believe me, most journalists will literally just copy and paste it into their writing. So this statement will end up EVERYWHERE.

7. Correlary to 6, many hyperlinks will be built off the words in the positioning statement from these articles to your website; as a result, these words will become your keywords for search engine ranking. If you want your website to surface when someone types in “best sausage in Indiana” in Google, make sure a variation of that appears in your positioning statement.

8. Its nice to have friends in high places that you can bounce the pitch too without worrying about an investment decision . . . (VC’s preferably) . . .

9. One of the hardest things about these statements is how to balance the short-term value proposition (we are a search engine) , long-term strategy (advertising is our business model), and vision (we want to organize the world’s information) . . .

10. personally, I miss working on things like this . . . .