Jun. 6–Last year, Robert Thompson was all set to start selling movie posters for rapper Eminem’s “8 Mile.” The president of Motion Imaging Inc. in Farmingdale says he even lined up an investor topay for the production of the posters, whose holographic style makes the people look like they’re moving. But ultimately the investor’s $100,000 check bounced.
So yesterday Thompson was at the annual Long Island/New York Metro Capital Forum looking for someone more solvent to fork over up to $2 million to help his four-year-old company buy six licenses for images of musicians and athletes including Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears. “I’m very optimistic,” he said.
So were the other 18 entrepreneurs who made their pitches yesterday before a room full of venture capitalists at the Huntington Hilton — despite the gloomy outlook for young growth companies.
Thompson, who has poured more than $450,000 into the company, displayed posters that have gone to market including a motion poster of a toss between Mets players Al Leiter and Mike Piazza that is being sold in Shea Stadium. How is his hunt for venture capital going? “I find the market to be tight and a little difficult,” he said. “There’s a lot of salesmen, but not a lot of guys coming through for us.”
Local experts at the forum say things may be turning around. “We believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel,” said Ross Goldstein, managing partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham Ventures in New York. “We’re actually making investments and looking for new ones.” The company has a $93 million portfolio, with only half invested.
Experts say venture capitalists who were burned only a couple of years ago by the speculative tech bubble are starting to look around as the venture market recovers. “It’s showing signs of life again,” said Jeffrey Bass, chairman of the Long Island Venture Group and a partner at Margolin, Winer & Evens, an accounting firm in Garden City. “But we’re not totally out of the woods yet on the economy.”
The market for new stock issues also remains weak, which doesn’t help because that’s how venture capitalists cash out of private companies in which they invest.
For the first quarter of this year, 35 New York Metro area companies received $212 million in venture capital funds, a 6 percent increase in dollar amount from the last quarter of last year, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/Venture Economics/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree Survey. The survey reported that no Long Island companies received venture capital for the first quarter.
Some local investors say that is not necessarily the case. Topspin Partners, a $213 million fund in Roslyn Heights, says it provided a couple of rounds of financing in the first quarter to local companies including Juventus, a biotech company in Cold Spring Harbor, and Open Access, a technology company in Melville, said Managing Director Paul Lowell.
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