We focus on early stage.

We like to be involved from the start, when a little money goes a long way to getting the first product or service up and running. More specifically, these are the areas we are most interested in for 2010.

Following is a partial list of investments made by the Mutopo team individually or as part of our early stage fund.

ZocDoc – doctor and dentist finder,  scheduler, rater - news tweets

TrialPay – online payment and point of sale advertising - news tweets

Sense Networks – real world analytics from location data - news tweets

Refinery29 – fashion community commerce content – news tweets

KoolSpan – next generation networking and security

Jovoto – a community changing the way work gets done in advertising - news tweets

Healogica – speeding up drug trials by improving patient awareness and participation

GameTrust (RealNetworks RNWK) – casual gaming

eTrios Capital – trades in energy & environmental markets

Daylife – newsware to organize & analyze news - news tweets

We prefer to be actively involved as the company defines their first offering and takes it to market. We dont have a specific formula, but we do tend to like companies producing products or services that we would use.

We think Sequoia Capital distills the core requirements for successful ideas and highlight areas to be covered in a pitch. David Skok, of Matrix Partners does a wonderful job explaining an often overlooked issue for startups – customer acquisition and monetization.

For reference material. MIT’s 100k business plan competition site also has some good resources as does MIT’s OpenCourseWare on Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship. And Y Combinator has an ever-growing library of great reading.

The Funded is an interesting resource when scoping out early stage investors, but also to get a feel for how other entrepreneurs have worked with investors.

More recently, we came across a tool which attempts to value companies in response to a range of questions. Apparently, the results vary, but I am optimistic it will be refined. Anyway, the questions are probably as interesting as the result, as you can get a good sense for what prospective investors like and what might scare them off.

Finally, before you decide that you want money from other people, take a look at 37Signal’s Getting Real and Rework. They write about and embody the alternative, which is not to need money (this doesnt mean you need to say no to Jeff Bezos, if he  insists on giving it to you).