Hummer Winblad's Mitchell Kertzman participated on the venture capital panel at SDForum's Platform 2.0 conference yesterday in Santa Clara. Much of the discussion with fellow VCs from Morgenthaler Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Hewlett-Packard was spent pondering the challenges and rewards of a startup trying to build a software platform. They agreed it was an ambitious but most likely, foolhardy path.

More generally, Kertzman said he looks for three things that can mitigate some of the early-stage risk when reviewing prospective first round investments :

1) Entrepreneur has done it before - While it doesn't guarantee future success, it lessens the likelihood of failure due to lack of execution

2) Product is at a demonstrable stage - Completely eliminates the possibility that the company will never even get out of the starting gate.

3) Company has obtained customers or prospective customers - Provides some market validation.

He noted that if an entrepreneur can't lay claim to anything of the things mentioned above, they might be better off raising some money from friends and family to further develop the idea.

For more on the Platform 2.0 conference, see:
Conference home page
Dan Farber

Tags: sdforum, hummer+winblad, vc, venture+capital