topherreynoso

I am a developer with a law degree who built plangrade with a friend and business partner who has a decade in healthcare and benefits. We built a solution that handles benefit compliance (think Obamacare, ERISA, etc.) for employers, mainly small to medium sized employers. We have been partnering with benefits admin, hr, and payroll software solutions since most of those don't have a proper compliance solution (surprisingly).

We are now being courted by a big company in the healthcare space and are being carted around Philadelphia on January 27th and NYC on January 28th to several very large healthcare carriers by this partner who wants to invest in us with their equity group.

We are not yet funded, it's just the two of us and we don't have a great deal of cash (yet). We are looking for a place to crash in Philadelphia on January 26th and possibly a place to crash in NYC on January 27th. It's just the two of us (both late twenties, male). Bonus points if it's at the home of a fellow founder who could offer us some advice on the startup process and talk to us a bit about navigating VCs and equity groups (especially in healthcare industry).

I've been a CFO for a small business and I have 2+ years of experience working in investment banking, identifying candidates for raising capital, guiding companies through VC and private equity, as well as business valuation experience. I have a law degree and I can hack Objective-C and rails. There are a lot of things I can offer to a startup and I am more than willing to live off of very little for the first year or two as long as there is a project I really believe in. Do you have a startup that could use those skills? Drop me a line at topherreynoso at gmail dot com

So I've applied to y-combinator in the past, I have sat across from investors before like a deer in the headlights.

That was before I got into the financial industry. Now I develop apps for that industry and I was thinking about an app to help small tech startups familiarize themselves with the financial industry and valuations by way of a quick valuation.

You would respond to 50 or so questions, if you have financial info for your company, insert it, then for a fee it gets sent straight over to a valuation pro who looks it over, crunches out a value range for your venture along with an A-F grade in 8 categories important to investors. This report gets sent back to you within 24 hours.

The value range certainly isn't a science and couldn't be relied on for tax purposes or anything like that, small tech startups are so difficult to value. But I wanted to gauge potential interest in a service like this.

I'd use valuation methods commonly used by investors and valuation professionals and send a report along with the value range and grades so that businesses have a better idea of what to expect to hear when they sit across from an actual investor or get a value from someone like y-combinator or others. I'd also have valuation professionals with many years in the business and all sorts of fancy degrees to build the methodology of valuation and to look over the generated reports. As a value added service, you could purchase a half hour or hour or so to speak with a valuation pro to go over your report with you.

Thoughts?