Picking the Right Entrepreneur Group

John Friess, like a lot of entrepreneurs, needed a sounding board when he and his brother Mark started a health-education company, Portland, Ore.'s Wired.MD in 2000.

So he began hitting business events, only to notice some of the same faces in attendance. Friess, who sold Wired.MD seven and a half years ago and is on his second start-up, started chatting up these fellow entrepreneurs. These parking-lot talks quickly developed into Starve Ups, an entrepreneur group that provides peer mentoring to founders and management teams of start-ups.

"Mentoring was readily available," recalls Friess. "Access to funding was available. So was hiring expertise. Direct peer mentoring was the missing link. We needed an environment in which founder could speak to founder, where we could talk to each other about core issues about our businesses." ...