July 17, 2007
Entrepreneur advice: Break down brick walls
Lorenzo Carver's lessons: Importance of teams, longer runways, and sticking it out
In this segment, Bambi Francisco interviewed Lorenzo Carver, a five-time entrepreneur. Lorenzo's latest startup is Liquid Scenarios, a company that makes software to help assess valuations of private companies.
The number one piece of advice is to be very careful about who you're partnering and working with. "Trust that they're motivated by things you're motivated by," he said. The other piece of advice is to give yourself a long runway - longer than what you anticipate. Many times there are unexpected challenges and with time, there's more resources to achieve your goal. The third piece of advice is not to be afraid to be persistent.
"Sometimes things take a long time to get right," he said. Short of telling someone to run into a brick wall, a person needs to at least try to get as close as possible, and possibly break through them. This last piece of advice is similar to what Vinod Khosla - founder of Khosla Ventures, former partner at Kleiner Perkins and co-founder of Sun Microsystems - who once said that entrepreneurs know how to crash through those brick walls. Khosla said in his "Lessons Learned' interview that entrepreneurs need to have the "bullheadedness" to "crash through walls" when times are tough, which will be often and frequent.
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Liquid Scenarios
Startup/Business
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Since founding bpCentral, our focus has been on increasing each user's competitive advantage each and every time they interact with one of our applications. Naturally, this involves more than simply enabling complex calculations to be performed accurately. In fact, during the first 12 months of developing our new technologies and applications, we put an inordinate amount of resources into discovering how to transform the relationships between idiosyncratic decision-makers and financial information. Our premise was that if that human to data relationship could be elevated to a new standard, then the relationships of those professionals with the entities and individuals they interact with could be more efficient and therefore more valuable.
In response, we developed CIMPA, the Carver Import Algorithm, a system that allows any electronic financial information, data or reports to be interpreted by a receiving system without the need for XML, XBRL, tagging approaches or extensive manual data entry. As a result of this technology, the Company's systems for private equity and venture capital professionals are able to import data in a matter of seconds, instead of a matter of hours.
Similarly, the Company noted that when users attempted to calculate the outcomes of complex liquidation preferences, anti-dilution provisions and other complex terms that are common to VC/PE transactions, any output was virtually impossible to verify without a costly audit of the formulas. Since the formulas were generally based in excel, this meant that few if any partners or other key investment professionals could afford to expend the effort to verify how amounts were arrived at. Upon further consideration, the Company realized that, to a certain extent, this was true of all financial reports. For traditional financial statements, this point is evidenced in the fact that notes to financial statements typically occupy several times more pages than the actual financial reports do. This realization inspired the Company to develop a system it calls OferX, which presents all financial information in a manner that allows any user to audit and see how amounts were calculated (in an easy to understand, quantifiable manner) without the need for extensive textual descriptions.
Together these unique tools form the foundation for the Company's offerings, which are backed by over 29 patent pending technologies.
Lorenzo Carver
Joined Vator on
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