GBF Ventures: An Overview

We have seen a recent influx of inquiries about our firm's history. While we appreciate the attention, we are very busy people and instead of answering each of you individually, we have prepared this canned response:

GBF Ventures is surrounded by the most prestigious venture capital firms in the world. Our prime location in the Stanford Shopping Center is a stone's throw from some of the most recognized investment names in Silicon Valley history, a fact that we have rigorously confirmed.

Investors in our most recent $900 million* fund include a member of Nigerian royalty, the Detroit Public Employees Retirement Fund, and the University of Phoenix (our founder's alma mater)  Endowment Fund.

Most of our companies have even gone on to receive consultancy from Sherwood Forrest Partners. Some of our more recent investments were in a traditional print media company, a company creating advanced mortgage calculation software, and a company that finds the identities of users of the illegal Bit Torrent copyright violation system and reports them to the RIAA. Although the RIAA refuses to pay for the service, the company has high expectations that it will soon find a source of revenue.

Full disclosure: GBF Ventures has had its share of failures. Among them was a case where we invested in a company founded by what we thought was a computer genius. It turned out he was actually a learning disabled Lord of the Rings fan -- a subtle difference, but one that was ultimately fatal to the venture.

Our firm has achieved a number of remarkable exits, and we expect our Germ Funding program to lead to many ideas that will have the potential for similar achievements.

* Currency listed in Flooz dollars

Introducing: The GBF Germ Funding Program

There are a plenty of seed funding programs out there, but we have decided to take things one step further.  With the GBF Germ Funding Program, entrepreneurs who do not yet have startup ideas will be given the tools they need to come up with brilliant Web 2.0 concepts.  Thanks to the leadership and mentoring we will provide, founders will then be able to seek outside funding by pitching the germ of an idea that they will generate in our program.

Our investment decision will be calculated based on the following criteria:

• Team members with degrees from MIT, Harvard, or Stanford (+10 for each)
  
• Team members who dropped out of MIT, Harvard, or Stanford (+25 for each)
  
• Number of times each founder visits the TechCrunch home page each day (+1)
• Is your company's name intentionally misspelled? (+2)
  
• Do you already have a demo you can show us? (-3)
  
• Amount of equity you're willing to give up in exchange for our investment (+1 for each percent)
  
• Personal relationships any of the founders have with high profile bloggers from technology news powerhouses such as Valleywag and Uncov. (+2 for each)

If you are interested, please e-mail your application to gbfventures@gmail.com.