[This post is part of an on-going series of video interviews with members of the start-up community – see a list of links to the full series here.]
A CEO turned professional board member, volunteer, organizer, angel investor, and most importantly, advocate for entrepreneurs, Joe Caruso is a fixture on the early stage scene in Boston. Always quick to compliment, and hesitant to criticize, Joe wears his passion for start-ups on his sleeve. He has been an angel since long before it was a commonplace thing to do, and has countless deals and board stints to his credit. Despite all that Joe remains as enthusiastic, energetic, curious and approachable as ever. I consider him both a friend and a mentor. So when we got together for a bite of lunch last week, I figured it was high time to add him to the video interview series.
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Um, yes. Too much product detail. Empty calories. Get rid of them. Why? First of all, because you have to get through it in 15 minutes and there is no way. But more importantly because all that detail detracts from your message. Yes, you are justifiably proud of your incredibly sophisticated product and, yes, you need to educate your investors to some degree about its many intricacies. Your investor pitch is neither the time nor the place. You want to keep product details at the “only what is absolutely necessary” level. And with the ones you include, you want to focus on benefits, not features.
[This post is part of an on-going series of video interviews with members of the start-up community – see a 
Launchpad portfolio companies have been busy this week. We just closed a $1.1M Series A round with JamHub, which they will use to accelerate the rollout of their very cool rock & roll products. They make a family of devices that allow bands to plug in and jam together with incredible and finely controlled sound quality for each player, but without the noise of a traditional amplified rehearsal. Silent and neighborhood-friendly rock & roll that sounds awesome to the musicians, but doesn’t wake the dead. Fantastic team – we are really pleased to be working with them. (Mass High Tech story here.)
And speaking of reinventing long-standing traditions, portfolio company Vizibility has done a radical rethink the humble business card. This week they launched their new line of NFC-enabled business cards to compliment their online identity management platform for professionals. For situations where you want to quickly pull up the contact info, LinkedIn info or Google results on someone you have just met, you no longer need to manually search or scan a QR code with your phone’s camera. One tap of the NFC enabled card will allow you to bring up the information directly. Very cool. TechCrunch wrote about it here, or you can check out the company at vizibilty.com.
[This post is part of an on-going series of video interviews with members of the start-up community – see a 