At some point in my life, with any luck sooner rather than later, I will be a self-sustaining entrepreneur. What better place to learn than Silicon Valley?

SDForum, a Bay-area tech entrepreneurship organization, put on a panel discussion last week about venture finance.  Since the event was nearby in the Palo Alto offices of DLA Piper, I had no reason not to attend.

The three panelists were all entrepreneurs, investors, or both: Jeff Clavier, SoftTech VC; Touraj Parang, Jaxtr; and Bill Reichert, Garage Technology Ventures. Sachin Maheshwari of Opus Capital served as moderator.

I was surprised by the demographics of the audience: it was far older than I expected, maybe 40 years on average. I think I was the youngest person in attendance. One thing that didn’t surprise me was the overwhelming maleness of the 50-70 entrepreneur attendees.

It was a good discussion.  They touched on numerous venture finance topics, from dilution to investor accredidation and everything in between.  However, the strongest point was also the simplest: the best time to seek outside investment money is never.  It’s not a new idea (one example), but it makes all kind of sense, especially for a capital-light venture like a web startup.  Bootstrapping, FTW!

One of the classes that I will be taking this quarter is MSE472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar.  The speaker list is impressive: the founders of Tesla Motors, TechCrunch, and BitTorrent are all on the docket.  Best of all, the presentations are available for free as podcasts.  The past ones were very good, so I have high hopes for those scheduled this quarter.