Speaker 4 - John Dimmer

Our fourth speaker was John Dimmer, a personal friend of the Andrew Fry's as well as an important member of Free-Range-Media. I really enjoyed having John come to class because he provided insight to what I would consider the most difficult aspect of starting a business, financing. John talked about some of his background before becoming an entrepreneur; Going to school for finance, working for a bank, working as a repo man, etc. He stressed early on the importance of learning the basics of accounting and financing, as well as learning how to read contracts and knowing when it would be a good time to seek legal council. One of my favorite lines from the talk is that, "Accounting is the method by which a business keeps score.". I think it makes sense to put business in this sort of game perspective, where you are forced to acknowledge the inherent competition involved in it all.

When the idea of starting a media company came up between Andrew and John, they sought out John's cousin who had developed "Internet in a Box", and we learned that when they started there were only 28 websites total on the internet. That is beyond hard to imagine today. It was interesting to hear that he didn't join FRM right away, instead telling the others to get ahold of him when they were big enough that they'd need him. It also wasn't surprising (though it was humorous) to hear that by the time he got the call they were about 6 months ahead of where he should have been contacted. You can't complain about that kind of growth! After FRM was sold, John decided to give retirement a shot at only 39 years old. He quickly found out just how boring it was, and decided to take on angel investing. Many in the class were shocked to hear him recommend investing in friends, which seems to go against what we hear so often, but he had a point when he said if not your friends, then who??

We learned about more than just his background, however, and he gave a valuable summation of Subchapter S Corps, LLC's, and C Corps. We learned about the stages of investing he described in order as Founders Money, Friends and Family, Seed Funding, and Venture Capital. He told us that every time you raise capital you lose equity, and that Angel groups can be better targets than Free Radical Angels because you get to pitch to groups instead of multiple meetings with individuals.
Over all I'd say I learned a lot from this talk, and if anything it provided me with a solid list of keywords to research on my own to better understand the processes of financing a business.

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