Area Industry Vets Lend Their VC Expertise

As a founding partner of TidePoint, the now-defunct technology infrastructure company that once was considered one of Baltimore’s most promising tech startups, Paul Mauritz still has regrets about the people who were hurt and the venture capital money that was lost when things unraveled.

So perhaps partly as penance, he has agreed to become a founder of the Baltimore Venture Mentors group, a team of local entrepreneurs that offers the wisdom of experience to young firms considering their own forays into the venture world. The group, headed by Baltimore businessman John Kirby and modeled after a similar effort started in Northern Virginia, will officially launch on Friday.

“I got involved with it because, at TidePoint, it would have been wonderful to have had a group to ask, ‘Hey, what do you think?'" said Mauritz, now a managing partner at Baltimore-based AppSolve. “I’ve been down that road. … I was involved in something that spent a lot of money — other people’s money. People were betting on us, and we were four guys in a conference room.”

Baltimore Venture Mentors will assemble a team of as many as 14 experienced entrepreneurs (11 are already signed up), and summon two young firms a month to pitch their companies. The upstarts will be given a few minutes to present their dreams, then will endure “the lightning round,” during which group members will offer their unvarnished views of the upstart’s prospects of gaining venture funding in an increasingly difficult market, or even of continuing to exist.

For this service, the group will charge nothing. But Mauritz warns: “At some point, we’ll have to look someone in the eye and say, ‘Keep your day job.’”

But that’s better than encouraging a kamikaze mission. Besides, many of the young firms that seek the group’s help will be viable candidates for funding in need of mere tweaking. Others will be solid businesses that should look elsewhere for capital. The idea is to get companies going in the right direction, group organizers said.

Kirby is the former CEO of Baltimore-based reachNET, a wireless telecommunications services firm that was acquired earlier this year by Annapolis-based TeleCommunications Systems.

Kirby isn’t sure yet how the Venture Mentors Group will decide which companies to select to advise, but said it will be based on a cursory review of a firm’s viability and its level of urgency in getting funded.

A formal system will be needed soon. Having already met to help its first two companies this month, the group will begin accepting applications on Monday via its Web site, www.baltimoreventurementors.com.

“I’ve already got a pipeline [of applicants], believe it or not,” he said, noting that the Greater Baltimore Technology Council, a partner in the effort, has been forwarding prospects, as have group members.

Kirby says the Baltimore group, while independent, is modeled after, and closely affiliated with, the Northern Virginia Venture Mentors group, started by John Casey, and a similar group in Tidewater, Va. The Baltimore chapter is a kind of franchise, Kirby said, though there is no formal business relationship between the groups. Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, the Baltimore real estate developer, provided Kirby’s group with seed funding.

The group doesn’t allow venture capitalists into their club — which is what separates it from some other programs that offer “dress rehearsals” for venture capital pitch meetings. The mentors figure that their charges will be looser if they know they can’t embarrass themselves in front of actual investment professionals.

The mentors group “fills a niche that we aren’t filling,” Penny Lewandowski said, referring to the organization she heads, the Greater Baltimore Technology Council. “This really fills a gap for us. We can’t do everything. … And these guys, John and Paul, are willing to talk about their mistakes. And you don’t find that often.”

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