Round Table Group, the Executive Education and Consulting Firm, Today Announced the Formation of Its Venture Advisory Arm.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 16, 2000

Round Table Group is now advising e-commerce startups and spinoff initiatives from established companies.

"RTG has actually been advising e-commerce companies since the firm was founded in 1994," said Russ Rosenzweig, RTG's CEO, "but this is the first time we've formalized the practice into a distinct business unit. RTG has gathered together a group of faculty thought leaders who are experts at advising startups," says Rosenzweig.

The team is a "venture architect" that provides strategic value-add by actively grooming business plans and crafting business strategies. RTG compresses the time-to-market and time-to-funding via mentoring, bringing key people to the team, and accessing a high-quality investor network.

Popular business and law school faculty members are ideally suited for early-stage mentorship. The Round Table Venture advisors are also faculty members who teach at RTG's executive education programs. The faculty include Harry Davis, a former dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Erik Brynjolfsson who heads e-commerce at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Hal Varian, a prominent author and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley, among many others. RTG links entrepreneurs with thought-leaders to hone the business strategy and provide ongoing advice and consultation.

"Though we work with 'pure' startups, most of our clients are established companies who seek to spin off business units in e-commerce and other areas," said Shawna Snukst, who heads the Ventures practice. Ms. Snukst was recently recruited from the PricewaterhouseCoopers management consulting practice to lead the group. She heads RTG's team of consultants who, along with the faculty, provide strategic consultation to client companies. "RTG's consulting staff are 'hyper-entrepreneurs' who have already started and sold companies. This lends significant implementation expertise to the strategic insights of the faculty."

She also notes that most of RTG's consultants are MBAs from Northwestern's Kellogg School and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. "We have a great affinity for Chicago and believe that it is emerging as a center for Internet commerce."

RTG expects to triple the size of its Chicago-based staff within the next six months to meet the demand for its advisory and executive education services.

RTG's focus on larger, established companies is unique in the context of "venture acceleration." Harry Davis heads RTG's corporate venture practice and has spent his professional career advising Fortune 500 companies on innovation.

He says: "Large companies struggle with product innovation not because there is a lack of commitment but because innovation is often at cross-purpose with other aspects of the business." Professor Davis continues: "Round Table Group provides a highly customized and collaborative approach to a company's product innovation needs in order to generate more successful commercial outcomes."

The outcome of an RTG innovation project is often ten or more venture capital-quality business plans for corporate spinoffs. Round Table Group has recently advised both Andersen Consulting and Lockheed Martin on e-commerce and innovation. Other clients who have come to RTG for advice on e-commerce and innovation strategy include Microsoft, Motorola, Lucent,

BellSouth, Black & Decker, GE, and Ely Lilly.

Beyond business school faculty and RTG's own team of analysts, RTG's mentors also include executives and board members of Fortune 500 firms. "These executives increasingly are seeing the value in allying themselves with innovative startups," explains Ms. Snukst. "They are also eager angel investors," she notes.

No stranger to the venture advisory world, Round Table Group already has equity stakes in many startups, including PeopleSupport, a hot Los Angeles company which recently raised $20 million from Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, Consumers Digest Online, a 40 year provider of consumer product evaluation content, AceIt Golf, a leading golf performance tracking firm, and the Wire Exchange, an "ehub" which links together buyers and sellers in the cable and wire industry. RTG recently sold its equity stake in Michigan & Oak Partners, a smaller, local venture incubator that RTG launched in 1998. Through Michigan & Oak it has taken equity positions in MVP.com (the new Benchmark funded startup headed by Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretsky, and John Elway), and FOB.com, among others.

RTG's CEO Russ Rosenzweig is well known in the venture capital and e-commerce community and is regularly a guest lecturer at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and at Stanford University, which recently published a business school case study about the firm. "Working with people like Harry Davis and Erik Brynjolfsson is definitely the highlight," he says. "Beyond being brilliant strategists, they are genuine and sincere people who are fun to work with."