Last night’s E.R.7 hosted generously by Joe Daniels from Fulbright&Jaworski featured Gil Beyda from Genacast Ventures and provided some very timely and useful information for all entrepreneurs who were in attendance.

Gil first talked about his technical and entrepreneurial background, which includes a series of very successful startups with big exits such as RealMedia (sold to 24×7Media) and Tacoda (sold to AOL). He pioneered the first ad server at Real Media as well as inventing Behavioral Targeting while at Tacoda. He setup Genacast with Comcast Investment Fund after meeting them while closing Tacoda’s E-round. Genacast invests upto $500K (or in syndicates upto $1.5M) in seed and series A rounds and the investments do not have to be strategic invesments for Comcast. It is a very new and open-ended fund with a current size of around $25M. They have made 2 investments so far and they are looking to make around 8 investments per year. Gil and Comcast are the only LP’s in the fund.

After brief introductions by the more than 40 entrepreneurs in attendance, Gil described his deal flow and how he makes his investment decisions at Genacast. His selection criteria include how much money is sought, valuation, if the space is familiar to him (since the fund helps its investments using their knowledge, experience and rolodex), evaluation of team risk, technology risk and execution risk and how realistic and thoughtful the founders are about their business. He usually has a 1-hour call after his initial screening of around 100 deals he goes through in a month. After stressing that the terms on a seed-round usually get carried onto the subsequent rounds, Gil recommended to all the entrepreneurs to become very familiar with the freely available documents (such as sample terms sheets) at nvca.org.

The last half hour of the meeting, we had an open-call for impromptu on-the-spot 3-5 minute pitches to Gil. After Gil promised to have conference calls with everyone who would pitch to him on the spot, we had 5 great pitches:

Manish Vora from Artlog.com

Greg from e-commerce startup

Greg Artz from General Sentiment (Technology demo site at http://www.textmap.com/)

Herman Mazard from Home Shop Technologies

Roger Wu from Klickable.tv

Gil provided great and very useful feedback to each of them on the spot and he will be talking to each startup who pitched to him in the coming weeks. The meeting ended with networking.