Your Personal Assistant: Rearden Commerce CEO Patrick Grady (Part 2)

SM: Valuations seldom work out in favor of the entrepreneur. I have written extensively about this.

PG: There is a book called “Venture Capital at the Crossroads” which documents a lot of these issues. The book has case studies which showed that the average entrepreneur wound up with 3% of their own company at the time of an exit. >>>

Next Strategy Roundtable on June 3, 8AM PST

This free webinar will be co-hosted with Texas Ventures. You can find more details and register here.

Newspapers Continue To Implode

Just yesterday, I wrote that newspaper advertising in the US still commands $35 million in ad spend. But the number is declining at a fast pace. My Future of Journalism piece recently discussed some of the alternative models that are emerging.

Meanwhile, The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) seems to be one of the worst hit in the newspaper segment. They were struggling not only with financial restructuring but with their digital transformation efforts as well. Q1 revenues of $609 million fell nearly 19% over the year. For the quarter, the company reported a loss of $0.52 per share compared to their break-even position a year ago. >>>

Your Personal Assistant: Rearden Commerce CEO Patrick Grady (Part 1)

Imagine the scenario of a senior executive on a business trip. Before the executive heads out to dinner a restaurant selection is in order. Enter Rearden Commerce and their virtual personal assistant. The executive simply opens the platform and receives restaurant recommendations. How? The platform already knows meal preferences, price ranges (per diem rate) which are approved for the trip, and how far away each restaurant is from his current location (think GPS here). Rearden Commerce offers a virtual personal assistant which offers corporations a value proposition of significant savings in travel budgets, and offers travelers a single interface for their entire trip (plane, car, hotel, food, entertainment, taxi, and the list goes on). Patrick Gradey, CEO and founder of Rearden shares his story with us.

SM: Where do you come from?

PG: I grew up in the suburbs of New York. My parents were immigrants from Ireland. My mother was from England and was a nanny. It was the great American dream. >>>

Sales Strategy Roundtable On June 9

For those of you who are working on sales and marketing issues, I will be doing a special roundtable on June 9 at 9am PDT with InsideView to specifically focus on those topics. You can get more details here.

May 20 Career Roundtable Recording

In case you missed this morning’s Entrepreneurship As A Career roundtable, here’s the recording:

MIT: Art & Science Of Bootstrapping Video Recording

Here’s the video recording of the MIT club’s bootstrapping event:

MITCNC-C3: 4/30/2009 – The Art and Science of Bootstrapping from Benjamin Joseph on Vimeo.

Video of an entrepreneurship panel event put on by the MIT Alumni Club of Northern California’s (MITCNC) Convergence, Community, and Commerce (C3). >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Coverity

One of the reviewers of EJ2: Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction on Amazon wrote: “I don’t think it was appropriate to even mention venture capital or angel investors in this book.” My response was, “One of the nuggets that I have picked up from my experience navigating the entrepreneurial waters is that it is wise to bootstrap early on, and develop negotiating power, but there is nothing wrong in using that negotiating power to then go and raise venture money at a good valuation, and with relatively little dilution. That is a theme that I have illustrated repeatedly in the book, through the stories of Greg Gianforte, Cree Lawson, even Manoj Saxena and Murli Thirumale.” In Coverity’s story, we have yet another example of a successfully bootstrapped company that raised its first financing only after thoroughly validating their business model. >>>