This was wonderful and very informative.

This was a great episode. When Mark said he didn’t think much of thefunded.com I figured he must have bad ratings there. But I looked it up and he’s rated very highly.

You guys are amazing. You’re timing couldn’t have been better. I’ve been listening to TWIST and TWIVC since day one and this has been the most useful of a lot of amazing shows. Thanks for the honesty, transparency, and for sharing.

Great session Marks. I took two pages of notes. Question that you guys spent some time on but still needs clarification for me; Total Addressable Market (TAM). My assumption is that a VC will know as much or more about the macro market being addressing as I do, therefore it is worth very little attention. It is a trillion dollar market and Google is a major player, blah, blah, blah. It should be covered somewhere, but not worth much attention IMHO. Where I think the real story and details are is in the REAL TAM. The question I have is; how should you focus this detail? Is the RTAM your current 12 month pipeline of prospects plus some specifics on Tier One target prospects? Or does it still contain the more fuzzy future sense of where your company can go and become the $50m-100m company by year 3? My opinion is that you should focus on people/companies/channels that you are talking to right now and/or have specific plans to engage within the next 12months and the RTAM is a conservative view of how much revenue you can drive from those relationships. My concern here is that for the vast majority of companies this number is not very big, 7 to 8 figure best case, and those kind of numbers don’t link well (psychologically) to the $100m exit an investor is looking for. I just think the billion dollar business plan is total pie in the sky, my preference is to show an investor how we make the first million, then how we multiply and pivot our way forward to a milestone that generates decisions around liquidity events. Is that RTAM strategy too real and risk taking the sizzle away from the opportunity?

Mark – in the “how to be introduced” segment, where do accelerator groups fit in the hierarchy? (San Diego CONNECT; Orange County OCTANe; etc.) Sorry I’m late to this, I missed it when it first aired. GREAT info that should be required for all pre-pitch entrepreneurs! Thanks. – Rich