EE matchmaker launches site to link entrepreneurs, partners

EE matchmaker launches site to link entrepreneurs, partners

The "first online matching service for entrepreneurs," as its creator describes it, launched on the Web last Monday. EntreMate.com will offer a user registry, profile posting, database searching and messaging among users trolling for prospective business partners or founding-team members. Would-be entrepreneurs can sign up at www.entremate.com and use the service free for the first three months, said Craig Maiman, the EE who founded the site and is its president. After Sept. 1, users who want to contact other registrants must pay a fee but can still join, post profiles and search the database for free.

Maiman, who is based in Acton, Mass., designed and built the Web site after being laid off from Mindspeed Technologies Inc. (Westborough, Mass.) in December. Maiman and nine other engineers went to work for Mindspeed after it had acquired part of Tenor Networks and some intellectual property for $15 million. (Tenor, a provider of packet infrastructure products, closed its doors in March.)

Seven months after the acquisition, Mindspeed executives canceled the group's project, leaving Maiman and his colleagues out of work. It was after that "ride on the telecom roller coaster," Maiman said, that the EE with 20 years' experience decided to become his own boss. He had an idea for a business and needed a partner. But he was hard-pressed to find one.

Maiman tried online message boards for entrepreneurs but received few responses. He found there was no convenient way to search for like-minded individuals with the skills, background and interests he needed for his business. When he turned for advice to a relative who had started a successful business, he was told that finding the right business partner is a matter of "luck."

Dissatisfied with the available resources and unwilling to leave his business relationships to fate, Maiman came up with EntreMate.com.

With roughly 9 million people out of work in the United States as of May, according to Labor Department statistics, Maiman believes it's a good time to launch a site for entrepreneurs. Roughly 10 million U.S. entrepreneurs have started an estimated 5.6 million businesses annually in recent years.

EntreMate users will pay only for the first message they send to a given party. Subsequent messages between the two will be free, since Maiman reasons that users will connect, trade e-mail addresses and jump off the network. The fee for sending a message will be based on credits a user purchases up front, with a subset of those credits allocated for messaging. Maiman said he has yet to work out specific pricing for sending a message but did say he expects messaging to be more costly than, say, sending a message via an online dating service, since EntreMate users will be pursuing business relationships.

User profiles include a listing of work experience and business interests that are categorized using the Labor Department "Standard Industry Classifications." Education level is selected from a pull-down menu of two- and four-year colleges. Using preset information tables on industry and education helps provide more efficient and accurate searches, Maiman said.

The profile also lists gender, since, according to research Maiman has reviewed, "gender is one of the most important criteria in finding a business partner."

Women usually choose to work with women and men with men, he added. In addition to filing a profile, users can attach a resume and list references.

Just as online dating services aren't the only way to find a romantic partner, EntreMate is not designed to replace the time-tested methods used to establish business partnerships. Rather, the site is designed to complement other strategies, Maiman said. He expects to add more detail to the profiles and searching capabilities in the coming months.

Ironically, a recession may be the "best time to start a business," asserted Larry Grumer, chairman of the Boston Entrepreneur's Network (www.boston-enet.org), a special interest group of the Boston section of the IEEE, who is managing director of his own investment consulting business. With so many professionals out pounding the pavement, he said, "entrepreneurs have the luxury of being able to find highly talented people-and being able to afford them." In the high-tech region around Boston, for example, the unemployment rate has hovered between 5.1 percent and 6.1 percent since April 2002, according to the Massachusetts Division of Employment and Training.

While the venture capital and angel investor communities have pinched pennies in the past year or so, they remain interested in the "right deal," Grumer noted. Investors no longer expect entrepreneurs' business plans to be built on a quick-returns scheme and an exit strategy, he said. They're willing to wait a few years as entrepreneurs use their funding to build viable, lasting businesses.

Nonetheless, given the dour economy, entrepreneurs looking to secure funding must first convince investors that their idea solves a real problem, and typically they must attain a milestone such as a working prototype, a product in beta or even a customer. "A lousy idea won't get funded," Grumer said, because these days "investors are doing too much due diligence to allow it."

But the tight investment climate has also discouraged some from starting their own business. Grumer said some would-be entrepreneurs are less confident that they'll be able to obtain financing or that the sums will be sufficient to justify the effort. Because of that risk aversion, he noted, many in the Boston Entrepreneurs group are holding on to their day jobs even as they launch startups. Some see the group's meetings as opportunities to network and job hunt, he said.

No illusions
Maiman can relate. He said he's been looking for work since December but has found very few suitable openings. His wife works part-time as a social worker. Maiman's severance pay and health insurance coverage run out in July, and with two teenage daughters to support, he hopes to land a contract job. Maiman harbors no illusions when it comes to obtaining funding for EntreMate.com. He hopes that after building the site's database in the next three months he will be able to find angel investors. Thus far, he has used his own savings to fund the operation.

According to Grumer, if Maiman does receive funding, he can expect to walk away with less cash than he might have a few years ago. That's true across the board, he said, although companies with a "good team, a defensible idea and a big enough market are more likely to receive what they are realistically worth."

Meanwhile, Maiman never did start the business he had been planning before his frustration in finding a partner planted the seeds for EntreMate.com. The 42-year old EE, who grew up in New York and its northern suburbs, watched the coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and was dismayed to learn that many of the responding firefighters' radios had failed, likely contributing to the loss of life. Maiman responded as an engineer, coming up with a plan to combine mesh networks and wireless-LAN technology to build more reliable communications systems for response teams. Perhaps EntreMate will lead him to some interested partners.

http://www.eet.com