CO-ENTREPRENEURS CONNECT

VENTURE AND CAPITAL

Suomen kanssayrittäjät SKY ry (e. Finnish Co-Entrepreneurs SKY Assn) is a community of individuals advocating knowledge investing as The Missing Link when building business from venture-to-capital (V2C): An association established and registered in Finland, in 2005.

Knowledge investors are interim owner-partners of ambitious (founding) entrepreneurs, dedicated to building investment-ready enterprises for global markets, and interested in realizing the entrepreneurial value-added at an eventual exit. Co-entrepreneurs invest their entire business competence, capability and connections in the target ventures, in exchange of equity – instead of selling their time for a fixed salary or fee – thereby establishing fully align interests.

Individuals can serve as knowledge investors either on a full-time or a part-time basis. The nature of an individual’s knowledge investment is either (more) tangible or (more) intangible. The younger and the less experienced the co-entrepreneur, the more tangible (for example, in terms of defined weekly working hours) the investment. However, knowledge investments are not, primarily, to be thought of as “mere sweat equity” but – ideally – as businessman wisdom and shared parenthood (with little or no pre-defined hourly commitment). By definition, knowledge investing refers to principal (not agent) type and level contribution, when creating a business.

SKY is the world’s first formally organized knowledge (or V2C) investor community and it will be an active participant in the operations of Global Venture Lab. More information on GVL and SKY's global expansion and the future forms of CONNECT Finland will be released on March 23, at V2C Forum 2009, in Jyväskylä, Finland (see www.v2c.info).