Published on May 12, 2008
in Events.
Okay, folks - with a week to go to Startup Riot, I’m ready to divulge all the details about the after party.
Thanks to the generous support of both Dash and Nelson Mullins, we are doing an after party at the Nelson Mullins offices in Atlantic Station (a few minute walk from the Twelve Hotel which is the venue for Startup Riot). The after party will run from 5:00pm until 8:30pm.
All conference attendees will be allowed to attend the after party. Folks who want to attend the after party but not the conference need to pre-register and be cleared to attend. The same attendance policy for the conference applies to the after party - no service providers and no vendors allowed. Entrepreneurs, job seekers, corporate employees (specifically those who invest or do M&A), non-profit employees, and investors are all welcome to attend.
The Nelson Mullins offices have a fantastic view of the city skyline and this should be a fantastic evening.
Oh, did I mention? There are a limited number of slots for attending the after party and there will be an open bar and some random snacks available.
Okay folks, there is new news for the upcoming Startup Riot which is only 2 weeks (!) away.
First, I’ve opened back up applications to present. There are still limited slots remaining but I’ve had a lot of people asking me to look at this company or that as a favor. So to be fair, I’m opening up the application for everyone on the site. One change though - along with your application you must submit your four slides (details below) along with your application. Based on those slides I’ll decide if you get a slot to present or not.
So if you want to submit slides to possibly present here are the rules. Your slides can’t have any animation, audio, video, or anything else to make them anything but static slides. They also must be submitted in Powerpoint (PPT, not the new PPTX) format. My suggestion is to cover your team, your product/service, and what you’ve accomplished and/or what you plan on doing.
Second, details will be coming soon (next day or so hopefully) about the after-party. Yes, there is going to be an after-party for Startup Riot. It’ll start right at the end of the event at 5pm and probably run until 8pm or later (depending on the final venue). Regardless of where we hold this, it will be somewhere in Atlantic Station so everyone can walk from the conference to the party.
So plan on attending the after-party if you come to the event or even if you don’t. We’ve got an awesome sponsor for this part of the day and this should rock.
UPDATE: fixed my suggestion above to include what I actually suggest for your slides. It was cut off before. Whoops!
Angus McRae had some interesting words about my post on healthcare issues for entrepreneurs so I thought I’d explore them some and make sure everyone got a chance to read his thoughts.
Two important points, I think, come from Angus’ comment. First,
Does the VC want to take on the fiduciary liability associated with becoming a plan sponsor?
And second,
In my mind the viability of the idea is dependent on the size of the VC’s portfolio and its willingness to take on the responsibility of managing the benefits of a varied group of employers.
Traditionally VCs have just provided money and insight and each portfolio company would make other decisions independent of other portfolio companies. Not too long ago, one VC (I’ve forgotten which one now - if you remember, post in the comments) acquired an executive recruiting firm so as to (presumably) help portfolio companies recruit better talent. This clearly leads to value creation for both the entrepreneur and the VC if better employees can be recruited more quickly for the startup.
I think this same thing applies to health care benefits. Having benefits isn’t a competitive benefit and doesn’t create value in the startup. It’s just another thing that distracts the entrepreneur from the important task at hand. The problem, though, may be this issue that Angus points out:
Insurers require there to be common ownership between the employers. This requirement may differ from carrier to carrier, but you should find the Internal Revenue Code definition of a “controlled group of corporations” to be safe ground.
Clearly I’m not a lawyer nor do I know the Internal Revenue Code. If this is the reason that this can’t happen, I think entrepreneurs and investors need to start lobbying their congressional representatives
for help in rectifying this situation.
Not too long ago I was speaking to a local entrepreneur and we hit the subject of health care costs for entrepreneurs and individuals. I started off by lamenting the high costs I’ve been paying as a temporarily retired entrepreneur and how hard it is to get health insurance coverage. In fact, as I found out, I can’t switch health insurance plans without being subject to at least a one year pre-existing condition clause. So I’m stuck on the plan that I currently have (not great but it’s expensive and there is no HSA option). Fortunately I’m in a position that this isn’t a killer hit for me (cost wise) but I can easily see how it is for other people.
We kept talking about how this singular issue keeps a lot of people away from entrepreneurship and startups. This entrepreneur mentioned that there was a person that he/she knew who was brilliant and wanted to do a startup but was stuck at a local large corporation because of health issues with his/her spouse. Doing a startup would have put this person’s family in economic jeopardy.
I know I’ve dished a lot about how fund raising is keeping good startups from getting started. But maybe that really isn’t the whole story as others have pointed out. Getting health insurance is painful and expensive and I imagine that it has kept more than a few people away from starting companies or doing something entrepreneurial. Maybe health insurance is keeping our entrepreneurial economy from achieving the levels that it should or can.
So what can we do about this? Maybe investors and VCs need to think about how they can obtain health insurance plans for their entire portfolio of companies. That would definitely be a value added service when you’re taking money from an investor group or firm. This type of approach would help reduce the chance (or at least the severity) of premium hikes which can easily happen in small companies. There were two years at Digital Envoy where we had a handful of employees who had kids during the same time frame (it was in the water, I think). Consequently our premiums went through the roof and I think we switched insurance carriers both times to reduce the severity of the hike. That was painful for the folks managing the plan and for all of the employees as well.
If you don’t know, insurance companies target to pull in at least X% in premiums than they pay out in benefits. X is some random number that is likely dictated by government (I haven’t looked into this fully so I don’t know the precise details). From what I recall, I had heard my previous insurance company was looking for X to be 5% or 6%. Wouldn’t it be nice to be in a business where you’re guaranteed to make a specified profit margin?
As your insured employee population grows, you have less likelihood that a large percentage of the insured employees are going to have a large health care expense in the same year. You also have employees that are in great health whose premiums “pay for” those who have large health expenses for whatever reason. For startups, the only viable player that is in a position to do this type of aggregation is the investor group and/or the venture capital firm. Maybe there are legal reasons that this can’t happen. If so, we should get the government involved. There is only one group that could possibly oppose this - the insurance companies. They’ll lose the ability to charge small companies more for their insurance premiums. For entrepreneurs this type of aggregation will save them money on insurance and for investors saving money on insurance means capital can be spent on real value creation instead of overhead.
One final note. As I’ve been dealing with this issue, I decided to drop an email to Angus McRae. Angus was a sponsor of Startup Weekend Atlanta which is how I knew about him. I dropped him a note about my situation and he replied very fully and gave me a lot of good information. On top of that, he didn’t charge me a dime to do it and he didn’t try to sell me anything. That’s what I call helping out the community and he, and his firm, get a big thumbs up from me. He hasn’t paid for this mention and he isn’t a sponsor of the blog. He’s just a helpful guy and that’s something I appreciate.
So, how do you deal with health insurance? Any tricks of the trade you want to share? Anyone have ideas as to how this can be made less of an issue for entrepreneurs and startups?
Okay, we’ve got to admit it. We’ve done a poor job on highlighting our local community. Even when we have wins, we don’t get much press about them. But this isn’t an Atlanta phenomenon. The Southeast suffers from this pretty widely as does the overall East Coast.
Over and over, I’ve heard people complain about the situation and say things like “we need to do something about this”. The only problem is, no one does anything about it. There is finger pointing between people who should be doing something about the situation, but nothing happens. Heck, I even tried to do it with a group of other folks over at Big Thinkr. Honestly, that failed miserably.
So I’m starting up this blog and will be writing here on a very regular basis about what is going on. This isn’t going to be limited to startups and venture capital. I’m going to cover local events and conferences as well - with “local” defined broadly as the East Coast but with a specific focus on the Southeast.
Why not use the old Big Thinkr name? I thought I’d start over with a clean slate. So welcome to a new look on startups, technology, and entrepreneurship. Keep visiting for fresh content and if it doesn’t come, demand it and provide ideas on what we need to talk about. Your involvement will help me keep the interesting news coming at a fast and furious pace.
By the way, you might be wondering who I am. You can get a full about on me on my blog or on LinkedIn but in a nutshell, I’m an Atlanta based entrepreneur who has raised venture capital and lived through the bubble.
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