Venture Capital: The Movie

The New York Times' Bits blog premieres (for us at least) a new video produced and distributed by the National Venture Capital Association.

The video tells the story of an entrepreneur who is trying to build a company around a device that can turn pollution into energy (be nice if it could do the same for sub-prime mortgages.)



Anyway, she's frustrated at every traditional turn--banks, government loans, and some odd hedge fund type--until she, of course, stumbled upon a venture capitalist. Well, he actually stumbles into her.

Readers of this blog won't learn anything from the video, but you might enjoy seeing a few of your colleagues in the cast. We didn't initially recognize Lou Bock from Scale Venture Partners who plays Jim, the oncologist/entrepreneur who has tapped out his friends and family to advance some cancer-related venture. Guess we've never seen Lou in a white lab coat before.

Stacy Leanos of Bay City Capital delivers a convincing performance as an uninterested low-level SBA bureaucrat.

Unfortunately Lou..er Jim quickly gets elbowed aside by the VC who is immediately captivated by the pollution-to-energy idea (Clearly, green energy has supplanted health care as the VC industry's feel good sector.)

But the many successes of life science venture capital investment get a fair representation throughout the film. Not as much hype as some others, but who is going to argue about the film's highlighting of Starbucks, Intel, Apple, Amazon, Google and other more household names.