Let’s be honest; the rush to grab funding in the New York startup community has brought out committed entrepreneurs as well as the ne’er-do-wells looking to make a quick buck. Not everyone is born with the savvy to create a killer idea, but Jeffrey Carr works to help those who—with the right mentors—can produce solid businesses. “One of the hurdles New York City has is, as good as the tech scene is, you’ve got to get those people together,” he says.

Carr is the executive director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, which connects its students with experienced entrepreneurs and others from the business community eager to share their knowledge. Carr says such mentors can help new entrepreneurs who keep open minds about their real world prospects. “I’m not naïve enough to think people actually learn from other people’s mistakes,” he says.

Brian Cohen, vice chairman of investor group New York Angels, says the local startup community needs more stringent scrutiny to separate the business ideas with potential from the driftwood. “There is a lot of room for improvement on the rigor that startups require,” he says.

At the NY Tech Meetup on Sept. 6, Cohen presented Carr and his team from the Berkley Center with the first ever Outstanding Professionals for their Entrepreneurial Leadership (OPEL) Award for their efforts counseling entrepreneurs and connecting them with experiences mentors. The award, created by New York Angels, will be presented annually to leaders who help nurture the local startup community.

Carr says New York’s entrepreneurial scene is very different compared with the hubs on the West Coast. He sees a need for more mentors and investors in New York who raise questions about the marketability of fledgling companies. “A lot of money here comes out of Wall Street; they’re private equity people,” Carr says. “In Silicon Valley, … Next Page »

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TechStars, the mentoring program and seed-stage investment fund for technology startups, is now taking applications for its new Seattle program. The application form is here, and the deadline is June 1; finalists will be notified on June 16, and the Seattle program will go from August 16 to November 12, 2010. TechStars Seattle executive director Andy Sack recently posted a personal account of how the program came to Seattle from Boulder, CO, and Boston. Sack and TechStars co-founder Brad Feld will host an informal gathering for interested entrepreneurs on the morning of April 6 at Louisa’s Cafe in Seattle.

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The Founder Institute’s program for startup CEOs is forging ahead in San Diego, according to Jeanine Jacobson, who is heading the new business mentoring program with fellow startup enthusiast Cliff Currie.

Jacobson tells me they have received about 30 applications for their training camp in entrepreneurship, and 15 have met the selection criteria so far. Jacobson says they want to admit 45 students to the inaugural session, but concedes it’s a challenging goal. Their deadline for new applications is this Sunday, and the San Diego-Orange County program plans to begin classes Nov. 3.

The Founder Institute is a four-month training program, with weekly company-building sessions and mentoring led by experienced startup CEOs. The classes are intended to help entrepreneurs navigate the early stage of starting a technology-based company, regardless of whether its business focus is biotech, Internet, or cleantech. The institute holds its classes in the evening to allow participants to keep their day job or develop their companies during regular business hours.

Bay Area serial entrepreneur Adeo Ressi, who launched the institute earlier this year in San Francisco, outlined his expansion plans for me in August. In addition to San Diego, Ressi told me he wanted to move as quickly as possible to launch the program in Washington D.C., Seattle, Los Angeles, and other cities. Ressi started the training camp for entrepreneurs as an affiliate of TheFunded, his website that rates venture capital firms. San Diego CEOs who have signed up as mentors include Dmitry Shapiro of Veoh Networks, DivX founder and former CEO Jordan Greenhall, and Profitline founder Rick Valencia.

Jacobson says the Cooley Godward Kronish law firm is the program’s title sponsor in San Diego, and the 3½-hour classes will be held in Cooley’s offices in the University City area. Mentors who have been recruited from outside San Diego include Philip Kaplan, serial entrepreneur and founder of Fucked Company and AdBrite; Jason Nazar, co-founder and CEO of Docstoc.com; and Peter Pham, CEO of BillShrink.com.

In addition to a $600 enrollment fee, which helps subsidize part-time staffing, catering, audio-visual fees, and other operating costs, the institute gets warrants amounting to a 3.5 percent stake in a company formed by a student-founder during the program. Warrants give the institute the option of buying stock in the startup at a fair market price, which is set during the first qualified financing round that the company raises. The institute distributes most of the value generated from the warrants back to the program, founders, and mentors. Ressi contends that warrants ensure that any equity purchased by the Institute is priced fairly by the market, in contrast to startup incubators, where Ressi says successful founders often say they got bad investment terms.

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I joined Boston University (BU) as a Lecturer and Executive-in-Residence in January 2008 and have been teaching courses on entrepreneurship to MBA students. My academic career has expanded recently with two projects.

First, I am collaborating with a friend and colleague Vivek Wadhwa at Duke University (I’m now an Adjunct Research Scientist at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering) to expand on his study about the impact of entrepreneurs on technology startups in the U.S. We are researching the impact of skilled immigrants on other sectors such as academia, retail, hospitality, healthcare, etc.

Second, I am launching the BU Kindle mentoring program to educate faculty, students, and alumni to facilitate early stage business formation. BU Kindle provides a unique opportunity for seasoned entrepreneurs and business executives to have direct and meaningful interaction with the BU community.

The Boston University Kindle Mentoring Program

MIT has several mentoring programs that have been instrumental in the institute’s success at commercialization and company formation. The MIT Enterprise Forum, the MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), the catalyst program at the Deshpande Center, and the MIT-HST Biomatrix are providing mentoring services to different constituencies.

BU has 3,900 faculty, 2000 laboratories, and 13,000 graduate students and received $336 million in external research funding in FY2008 (July 2007-June 2008). According to the Association of University Technology Managers’ 2006 licensing survey of US and Canadian institutions receiving more than $250 million in research funding, BU was at the bottom of the 3rd quartile for research dollars spent per license granted.

BU Kindle is a step towards accelerating commercialization of BU intellectual property and to encourage BU faculty and students to launch commercial ventures. BU Kindle will connect BU faculty and students to seasoned entrepreneurs and business executives in Massachusetts by creating a custom mentoring model based on the ones at MIT, including the MIT VMS.

BU Kindle joins several other programs at BU that support and encourage commercialization:

Additionally, BU created ITEC, the Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship & Commercialization, in 2007 with the mandate to integrate entrepreneurial activities across the university. ITEC has developed several innovative programs, including eSPRIT (Entrepreneurial Students Participating in Research and Innovative Technologies) and a $50K business plan competition for students. Furthermore, BU students run several entrepreneurial focused clubs where students gather to learn about opportunities and form teams to pursue opportunities.

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The University of Washington’s TechTransfer department has launched a new program over the last four months that brings local entrepreneurs into the university to help academic researchers in the early stages of starting a company. This program, which is part of UW’s startup-support service, LaunchPad, matches volunteer entrepreneurs with faculty and other researchers interested in learning what it takes to build a successful company. (Xconomy previously wrote about LaunchPad here.)

Unlike more traditional entrepreneurs-in-residence programs (which UW also has), where entrepreneurs come in later in the game to help shape a particular company and often take on the role of CEO in that company, these new advisors will help with a range of projects well before they’re at the startup point.

Janis Machala, the director of LaunchPad since November, is spearheading the new program, which is being formalized this month. The experts she’s bringing in are tentatively being called LaunchPad “entrepreneur advisors.”

“Vetting research early with industry, with people who have had to go through the funding process, with people who have had to pitch their deals to strategic investors, will help give the researchers a sense of the reality of what it takes to make something translated into the commercial world,” Machala said in an interview. “This is really about trying to narrow that gap between the lab and the commercial.”

To find these expert advisors, Machala looks to her extensive network of local contacts. She just came to UW from an extensive background in the startup world, most recently from Paladin Partners, a Kirkland-based consulting firm for startups she founded in 1995. Machala keeps her ear to the ground for news of senior executives going through some kind of transition—retirement, company mergers, and so forth—someone who would have some spare time to volunteer with the researchers.

“People are really excited about this program and the idea that they can help in a meaningful way,” Machala said. And it helps that she is only asking for their time and not a check, she added. “So many of these people are being pitched to be an angel or to be on a board. They don’t have to have a formal relationship here.”

Jeff Canin, a local serial entrepreneur and consultant specializing in clean technology, just started as one of the entrepreneurial advisors last week. One of his first orders of business will be helping some UW researchers start a company around new solar cell technologies. Starting a successful cleantech company is not so different from any other successful startup, Canin said. “You have to have a differentiating solution to a large problem,” he said. “Often one finds a researcher or a technologist may have a grand idea, but it doesn’t serve a specific market.”

Among other advisors recently signed on at UW are Chris Porter, formerly of Cellpro and Pfizer; Joe Eichinger, co-founder and president of Redmond-based CoAptus Medical; Michael Hovanes, a serial entrepreneur in medical devices and imaging; and John Hansen, the former CEO of Bellevue-based Vallent (acquired by IBM in 2006). We’ll be keeping an eye out to see what impact this distinguished group has on the UW startup community.

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It’s going to be a busy summer for Andy Sack. The serial online entrepreneur and investor is getting deep into his latest venture, Founder’s Co-op, and he doesn’t have much time for chit-chat. I’m just able to catch him on his cell, while he’s rushing off to a meeting and getting ready to head out of town.

I’ve heard a lot about Founder’s Co-op, Sack’s new collaborative of Web entrepreneurs, and I want to get the story straight from the horse’s mouth. But Sack, an Xconomist originally from the East Coast (he’s been in Seattle for eight years), is also uniquely positioned to comment on the broader state of Web entrepreneurship in the area, something I’m tracking closely these days. “It’s more active than it was, but it’s fragmented,” says Sack of Seattle’s startup climate. “There hasn’t been a really big win since Amazon. People are looking for the next big hit.”

So that’s the context. Back in January, Sack and his business partner Chris DeVore had wound down and sold off Judy’s Book, a local social networking and shopping site, and started working on their next project. “Founder’s Co-op came out of lessons learned at Judy’s Book,” says Sack. “In part about overcapitalization, and in part about focusing on fundamentals in business—like generating revenue ahead of expenses.”

The vision of Founder’s Co-op is to bring a group of entrepreneurs together, invest in small Web companies (typically comprising just two people—one business and one technical), and share 5 percent of the equity in each of the companies among them. The size of any particular investment is expected to be between $10K and $250K. The networking support is pretty informal, says Sack, but he’s providing mentorship to first-time entrepreneurs, peer-to-peer mentoring through weekly lunches and other gatherings, and shared office space.

Sack points to two compelling motivations for forming his new group. “One, it costs less to get to market and create a real business than it used to. Very small teams can have highly leveraged businesses without a lot of infrastructure,” he says. “Number two is a real lack in the Seattle community of supporting first-time entrepreneurs with expertise, mentoring, and networking. Those things exist much more in Boston and San Francisco, and for some reason it doesn’t exist here. Chris and I have a desire to fill that.” (Take for example the Boston area’s Y Combinator, which Bob wrote about last month.)

In March, Sack and DeVore announced an initial $2 million fund, and played an active role in focusing and supporting two local startups, helping them get off the ground: Cooler Planet (which matches alternative energy suppliers with customers) and Orange Line Media (which monetizes online stock photography). “Now we’ve made a commitment, and we’ll raise more,” says Sack.

How’s the new venture working out so far? “It feels like we’ve got solid footing in terms of deal flow and things like that—the things that would make you feel good about investing in this environment,” says Sack. The plan is really to attract first-time entrepreneurs, such as those leaving big companies in Seattle, Redmond, Kirkland, and the like. “We’d like to be their first stop,” says Sack. And the unique challenges of the area? “Talent is a real issue for the startup community,” he says. “It reminds me of Boston in the late 90s, it’s a very tight labor market.”

As for his plans for the near future, Sack is pretty tight-lipped. “There’s a bunch of deals we’re working on,” is all he will say. Some could be pretty interesting, so watch this space. (He could tell me now, but then he’d have to kill me).

I ask Sack about his biggest surprise these days, and he admits that it’s how well his portfolio companies, Cooler Planet and Orange Line Media, are doing in terms of generating revenue already. “They’re off to a great start,” he says. “Of course, a great start doesn’t make a great finish. But it’s better to have a great start than not.”

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The first thing I want to know is what “TiE” stands for. Answer: The Indus Entrepreneurs, which reflects the South Asian background of the organization’s charter members. But over the years, TiE has sometimes been referred to as “Talent, Ideas and Enterprise” and “The Innovative Ecosystems.” So excuse my confusion. (I would opt for “Twin Ion Engine,” but that’s a Star Wars geek talking.)

Names aside, TiE (pronounced like the word) is a global not-for-profit network of some 12,000 innovators in 48 chapters across 15 countries. It started in Silicon Valley in 1992, and its mission is twofold: to promote entrepreneurship across the globe, and to provide a platform for entrepreneurs to share ideas. TiE Boston, founded in 1997, is the second-largest chapter after Silicon Valley, with 600 members.

Which is where Vanita Shastri comes in. A social entrepreneur, India policy consultant, and educator at Boston University’s School of Management and other area colleges, Shastri took over on May 1 as the new executive director of TiE Boston. I caught up with her last week to chat about her new role, which these days includes gearing up for TiECon East, her chapter’s largest annual event, on May 29th and 30th.

Xconomy: What are the goals of the TiE network?

Shastri: It was started with the aim of fostering entrepreneurship. In this process, the organization has grown to be one of the world’s largest for promoting entrepreneurs. Members have access to a database of people, including charter members who are very experienced entrepreneurs who have been there, done that. It’s very useful if you’re traveling, for instance, and you need introductions, or advice.

Xconomy: How did you become involved with TiE Boston, and what is your new role?

Shastri: I’ve been a member for several years, and been involved since its inception. As executive director, I’m basically running the organization, and looking at taking the TiE Boston mission to the next level—thinking about what new stuff we can do here. It’s my responsibility to take care of memberships, events, and initiatives. Also workshops, partnering with universities, and communicating with other chapters.

Xconomy: What are the unique challenges you’re facing?

Shastri: I’m juggling a few different things. Because TiE grew organically over 15 countries, in the last three years there’s been an initiative to promote “TiE Global,” and do the branding for the whole organization. At the Boston level, we have special interest groups (SIGs), consisting of 14 different verticals—wireless, semiconductors, software, outsourcing, and entrepreneurship, for example. They organize events and panels. They’re a subgroup of the chapter. We also have a women’s initiative, which is a horizontal.

My interest, from the academic side, is in how to mentor entrepreneurs. My aim is to bring the interest back to things that will help entrepreneurship. You can come on our website and you can be matched one-on-one with a charter member for three or four hours a week. Maybe you need help with a business plan, or how to make a pitch to VCs, or how to find an angel investor.

Xconomy: How’s it going so far?

Shastri: It’s very exciting. I’ve been an entrepreneur, I’ve done teaching, I’ve done nonprofit. I can roll it all into what I’m doing. It’s a lot of work, but it’s really exciting. The challenges are keeping everyone happy. For instance, our sponsors need value delivery, and we want to keep growing. We want to add two or three new SIGs every year and do 60 events per year.

Xconomy: So what’s your advice to young tech entrepreneurs?

Shastri: My advice these days is that they should get started. A downturn in the business cycle is a good time to get started, as there is enough talent to hire, capital is chasing good ideas. You could build a company using low cost inputs and when the economy swings back, ride the tide of high valuations.

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