Don Brown of Divvs was voted best presentation at the first Startup Gauntlet.  Great time was had by a brave pack or early stage entrepreneurs looking to perfect their investor presentations.  We are doing this again next month. 

Update:  After reading this post this morning I decided that it deserved much more prose.  The above was created using the iPhone TypePad app which is not great for creating new articles.

Startup Gauntlet was a great little event that I think helped move all the participating entrepreneurs along.  The title of the post was taken from the certificate Don won for having the best presentation.  Truth be told, his presentation was darn good, along with those given by several other entrepreneurs.  To give you some idea of the high quality, Stephen Fleming (who has funded a few things in his day), made the comment to me that he thought several of the companies were ready for their first round of funding.  I agree.

With that said, the quality was uneven.  A few forgot their pitches entirely or only made it about a third of
the way through their presentations.  That’s OK.  The purpose of Startup Gauntlet is to help entrepreneurs practice, refine, and get better so that when they get out their in the real world, in front of real investors they can succeed.  And the most magical thing is that the participating entrepreneurs starting learning from each other.  Seeing what others were doing so that they can understand where they need to go.  Providing feedback to each other (and to the Dungeonmasters).

Photos courtesy of Mike Schinkel.