Elie Kochman on Business and Networking

In continuation with the articles I’ve been posting recently, here is another based on the show Dragon’s Den. If you go to their website, you can see a preview of the pitches that will be on the upcoming episode. My question is as follows:

Can you accurately guess, for each of the 8 pitches, whether there will be an offer, and, if there is an offer, how much equity will it ultimately cost, and will it be straight equity for cash, or will it have an alternate financing structure (e.g. establishing a line of credit/operating line)?

There is no prize for the right answer, although I will be getting in touch with anyone who gets it right to know what it was about the summary of the pitch that tipped you off.

For me, my guess is that the Fazzari Push-up Machine will get one of the offers, because they seem to have a reasonable product that can be leveraged. They are asking at a value of $300,000, but without knowing the details of their past sales, there’s no way to know how accurate that evaluation might be.

Alternatively, Techno Logic looks optimistic as well, with a product that fills a need with an exercise machine that takes up little space, but they have a very high valuation (just under $1,500,000) which they will likely have a hard time backing up with numbers. If they can convince one of the Dragons that the company is worth at least $1,000,000 then they may be able to strike a deal. Alternatively, the Dragons may offer an operating line as part of the cash to help deal with the high valuation.

While these two concepts don’t need to be at odds with one another, I’m curious to know how people perceive the difference between networking online versus in person. Most people do both, whether consciously or not, but what’s the difference between the two?

One answer is that our online networks tend to be a lot more widespread than our in person networks, including a lot more people. However, when we connect with someone in person, we tend to create a stronger link on an individual basis.

What do you think are some of the differences between online and face-to-face networking?