Earlier this week, I attended the Founder’s Showcase, an event put on by the guys behind TheFunded, a community site driving transparency in the venture capital business.  This event featured 10 pitching startups and keynote presentations by Jason Calacanis, Founder and CEO of Mahalo and Elon Musk, Founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

So the presentations, the startups and the judges were amazing and definitely worth the price of admission.  The networking, not so much.  I think my distaste was because we actually bought one of those little sponsoring tables lining the room which kept us at that table during most of the event and away from the good action out in the crowd.  With that said, the few people I met were great and I really enjoyed getting to know them.

Re the speakers, Jason Calacanis was awesome and talked truthfully and often brutally about running a startup, raising venture capital and network,ing your way to the right set of investors.  He also managed to find the opportunity to plug each one of his portfolio companies to include Gowalla and the other initiatives he is currently running (The Launch Conference and Open Angel Forum the later one which I sponsored in the past and will happily continue to do).

Elon Musk was the second speaker and although he was waaay more low key than Jason, the guy was key in launching PayPal and founded an Electric Car Company (Tesla) and a Space Company (SpaceX) so of course the audience was hanging on his every word.  My biggest takeaway from Elon was his non-wavering insistence on staying the course no matter what all of his pundits were saying at the time.  You have to remember that he founded Tesla and SpaceX during the technology bubble crash in the earlier part of this decade and during a time when all of his PayPal buddies were off starting internet ventures like LinkedIn (Reid Hoffman), Slide (Max Levchin) and Facebook (Peter Thiel).  So until the recent success of both Tesla and SpaceX, Elon was looked at crazy.  But now after seeing relative success from both ventures (Tesla recently went IPO and SpaceX apparently had their first successful shuttle launch), he’s not looking so crazy after all.  Anyways, I really enjoyed his presentation until they opened it up for Q/A and the dungeons and dragons crowd came out with questions like “So are you really going to retire on mars” and “what do you think about exploring the underwater regions as possible human settlement alternatives in the event that land and space don’t work out.” Oh and btw, I’m not saying anything but apparently those were considered valid questions which Elon answered with a straight face :/

I also enjoyed listening ot the startup pitches and thought many of them did a good job.  Below is a list of the ones who presented (courtesy of the post written by Audrey Watters of ReadWriteWeb, who I really enjoyed meeting and talking with).  Please note that whereas the name and brief description and courtesy of Audrey, I was the one who wrote in the italicized opinion about them :)

The ten companies pitching were:

• Geotoko, aplatform for location-based contests and sweepstakes.  I saw them at a previous pitch event and actually liked them but they got ripped by the  judges for building a service that the geo-location companies will probably build themselves eventually.
• TouristWay, a tool to help travel agents build websites.  I thought this guy and his presentation was just ok.  I agree with the judges that this isn’t a venture backed business but a great dude business (as Jason calacanis explains it to be where a dude runs a business and makes a lot of money).
• TribeVibe, a tool to help track social media influence.  Ok, this guy got ripped by he judges HARD mainly for not showing any of his product.  He had one of the best power points and smoothest presentations of the night but the judges saw right through it and called him on all of his bullshit.  It was brutal (but funny to watch).
• Seeport, a video telepresence technology.  He was presented as the guy who invented the game where in the world is Carmen Sandiego (if you were born in the 80’s or later, you’ve probably never heard of this game).  This gave him immediate credibility as a software innovator.  His presentation was smooth, simple and to the point.  There’s a longer story here, but this was the startup voted as the winner.
• Ergolution, an online assessment tool to help eliminate workplace injuries.  This presentation was the weakest of the night and got ripped accordingly.
• MediaShares, a way to crowdfund an SEC-approved IPO on your website.  This guy’s presentation was very mediocre imo, but his business and market opportunity generated a ton of interest from the judges.  He was close to being the winner, but seaport just etched him out.
• FatPencil, an online tool for pilots to log flight information.  Best presentation of the night in my opinion.  But agreed to be more of a “dude business”.
• Liv, a social shopping tool.  Either it was late or people were drunk, but this presentation was also on the weaker side.  Basically he was exposed as developing a product that had little value or interest in society.  Ya, Ouch, but better they hear this sooner vs. later so they could start spending their time building something with more value.
• Aprendi Learning, a service to help universities build scalable online courses.  These guys came in second place and I can’t say that I understand why.  I get that they’re addressing a big business opportunity in online education, but the judges exposed a weak customer acquisition strategy and competitor differentiation strategy both of which I agree with.
• ShareSquare, a way to link print promotions to the mobile web.  I don’t think anybody is going to scan a barcode on a movie or music poster, so I don’t see any viability of this business.