Stunning Takes Michigan CEOs to Lunches with Prominent Bay Area Venture Capitalists
Entrepreneurs and innovation-based companies are a sweet spot for Stunning. Andy and I met in Silicon Valley — at a venture capital firm. Technology-driven companies are near and dear to our hearts. So when I was setting up my Twitter account for Stunning and came across Tim Draper’s tweet about a charity auction to have lunch with him at Tamarine, a Palo Alto VC haunt, I jumped at the opportunity!
Lunch at Tamarine. From left: Chuck Salley; Jason Bordainick, non-Michigan auction winner & CEO Off Campus Partners; Scott Hanson; Amanda Ross; Peter Scott; Tim Draper; Mahendra Ramsinghani.
It turns out that the charity, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (Bay Area chapter), had a few other auctions going on. Power Lunches with Frank Caufield and John Hummer — at Hummer’s home in San Francisco — as well as with the CEOs of eBay and OpenTable at eBay headquarters. We bid on and won those auctions, too!
How could we pass up the opportunity to help build out the funding connections for Michigan-based technology companies?!?
And in those last hours of fundraising frenzy, the director of the LLS team sponsoring the auctions, the Managing Director of Credit Suisse, chipped in a meeting with one of his firm’s cleantech analysts! And another team member arranged a power lunch with Ira Ehrenpreis, cleantech Wunderkind at Technology Partners! This on top of a meeting with business attorney Roger Royse, an active member of Palo Alto’s VC Taskforce.
The result? Stunning’s Summer of (VC) Love! … Sideburns and bell bottoms optional…
Our first trip is next week, and our guests are pretty stunning themselves: CEOs Scott Hanson of Ambiq Micro and Peter Scott of Current Motor Company, along with First Step Fund Managing Director Mahendra Ramsinghani. What a powerhouse of Michigan talent to present our entrepreneurial opportunities to some of the biggest names in Bay Area venture capital!
Ambiq Micro is an early stage fabless semiconductor company that has developed the world’s most energy-efficient microcontroller (MCU). The Ambiq MCU requires 25-130 times less energy in sleep mode and 4-10 times less energy in active mode than today’s generation of functionally-equivalent MCUs.
Current Motor Company is the only company producing 100% electric vehicles in Michigan. They manufacture a scooter that can go 70 mph and up to 80 miles on a single battery charge. It only takes four hours to fully recharge the battery, and you just plug it in to any standard home electrical outlet. No gas tank and no muffler. Amazing!
Mahendra Ramsinghani serves as our “big picture guy.” As a longtime member of Michigan’s VC community, Mahendra knows Michigan deal flow and will be able to give an overview of the companies and sectors offering the best opportunities at the best valuations. We’re so fortunate he can join us!
Stunning’s goal?
Learn as much as possible about how to position our early stage clients in terms of investor relations and marketing for startups. The better we understand the VC mindset, the more we can help our clients thrive in the current funding climate.
As a new company, we also want to show potential clients that we’re always looking for ways to move their business forward. Proactively and creatively, ready to take advantage of golden opportunities wherever they appear.