Joanna Glasner

Draper Fisher Jurvetson is hosting its annual business plan competition again, but this year is telling presenters to stay home. The Silicon Valley firm's contest -- which includes 16 startups from 6 countries -- is using TelePresence, Cisco’s costly and much-promoted videoconferencing system that’s designed to make people in different places appear as if they’re in a single boardroom. The competition takes place on Tuesday, with judges gathering at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters to choose who will win a $250,000 investment. Half the presenters are based in the U.S., with the others located in Israel, China, Russia, India and Brazil. Finalists run the gamut from Five Minutes, maker of a Chinese social game called Happy Farm

SecondMarket, which bills itself as a place to buy and sell otherwise illiquid assets, launched a site today called Private Company Marketplace. The tool will allow private company stakeholders —  including founders, angel, venture and private equity investors, and employees — to list shares to sell to accredited investors. It’s interesting timing for a launch, […]

Entrepreneurs who slave to craft a perfectly-articulated business plan expect the effort will pay off with better odds of getting funded. But they're probably fooling themselves. That’s the finding of a study conducted by two professors and a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Management and entrepreneurship professors David Kirsch and Brent Goldfarb, along with doctoral student Azi Gera, studied business plans and found quality had zero impact on the amount of VC funding raised. According to the summary that hit my inbox this morning, the group studied business plans of more than 700 dotcom companies from the late-1990s to early-2000s. They compared characteristics of each business plan – including the contents, team make-up and business model – and whether the plan received venture capital funding.