California woman creates dynamic way for entrepreneurs to locate venture capital

by Danny Bloom
[Internet News Blog]

June 25, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Gini Graham Scott talks, entrepreneurs looking for venture capital opportunities listen.

The Oakland woman has created and put online an innovative way for entrepreneurs trying to find prospective investors – on Internet time!

"My new business, Venture Capital Connection, draws on the power of the Internet and new technologies to send out multiple, tailored queries for entrepreneurs under their own e-mail address to venture capitalists," Scott says. "I have a huge database of over 6,500 venture capitalists, and based on each entrepreneur's particular industry, amount of funding and location, I can help people find the partners they need."

Scott, who has a doctorate in sociology from the University of California-Berkley, adds: "There are no commissions or finder's fees for me. I just sell the email service, and the rest is up to the entrepreneur and the investor."

Scott says her system can help entrepreneurs save potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in initial start-up and financing fees.

And the process works, Scott adds.

"For example, one businessman from Europe working with a firm based in San Francisco, told me he got over 200 responses within one day to an email query for a company providing services for the disabled community, and 19 of these were requests to see the company's business plan.," Scott says. "In one day, on Internet time, he got a great response."

Sounding a note of bemused irony, Scott said she thinks that Venture Capital Connection's very first client a few weeks ago was perhaps a government investigator.

"After putting my first text ads on Google, I found that someone had mysteriously deposited almost $350 in my firm's PayPal account to use my system," Scott says. "But after over a week of sending out confirmation letters requesting information from the client, there was no response. Nothing. And the domain name in the client's e-mail didn’t yet exist, while a Whois search showed it to be listed to someone with a different name in a different city. I found it very odd, indeed."

Scott believes it might have been a government investigator checking to see if the service was legitimate, since something similar happened when she started PublishersAndAgents.Net, which makes connections between writers and publishers, literary agents, film producers, and film agents.

"In that case, a client paid about $400 through PayPal and said she was still getting her material together in response to a second confirmation, but she never responded again to use the service and never asked for a refund," Scott said. "I always wondered who that was!"

Scott notes that her new venture (www.venturecapitalconnection.com) is a spin-off of PublishersAndAgents.net, which has linked nearly 500 writers worldwide looking for deals with book publishers, agents, film producers, and production companies.