David Politis

Early this morning, University Venture Fund announced that it has tapped 10 MBA students from the Wharton School to assist the UVF in running its $18 million private equity fund.

Founded in 2001 at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business as an entrepreneurial tool for UofU students, the UVF went on to raise $18MM from limited partners, making it both the first and largest student-run private equity firm in the United States.

Following today’s announcement, the Wharton connection brings to the self-sustaining UVF team 10 Wharton students and four faculty advisors, including a Fulbright scholar, the ex-CTO of NASA, a student with an M.D. from John Hopkins, as well as students with work experience from Microsoft, Google and Goldman Sachs. 

Among the first 10 companies UVF invested in, at least one — Omniture (NASDAQ: OMTR) – has experienced a financial exit, specifically through an initial public offering.

When I began my first professional job in public relations in January 1984 at Tycer-Fultz-Bellack in Palo Alto, California (then the largest high-tech ad/pr agency west of the Mississippi River), we had to write or type our news releases by hand and then give them to a secretary who would get them “word processed” for us.

If we needed to get a news release or a pitch letter to an editor fast, we used a courier to have it hand-delivered (assuming, that is, that the journalist lived in the same metropolitan area). Typically, however, fast delivery meant using the U.S. Postal System.

There were no fax machines, no personal computers, no desktop publishing, no FedEx, no cell phones, no email, no Internet (at least not that the general public knew about), and certainly no World Wide Web.

Broadband connectivity? What was that.

BlackBerries? Don’t you find them growing on vines out in the country?

Apples? Yeah, they grow on trees. One supposedly fell off a tree and bonked whats-his-name on the head.

And Web 2.0? Is that the name of the sequel to “Charlotte’s Web?”

A lot has come and gone in the 22+ years since I started working in the field of PR, but one thing has not changed.

If you absolutely, positively have to make an impact in Public Relations, particularly if you’re talking to management, you had better figure out how you (and your PR campaign/strategy/tactics) can positively impact the bottom line. Otherwise, you might as well go off and flip burgers for a living.

Simply put, it doesn’t matter how many people you reach or products you introduce or product evaluators who write favorable reviews or great speeches you write or stories you place, etc., etc., etc. If you can’t frame the discussion within the context of bottom line impact — leads generated, revenue growth, return on investment, market share increase or what-have-you — you will not succeed in the long run.

Your PR plans (and their projected results) have to be concrete and such results have to be measurable. If not, you will always be fighting an uphill fight with the bean counters in the room who demand quantitative results.

For about the 15-billionth time, Politis Communications took at least one of its clients to a ShowStoppers Media Reception at a major trade show. And once again the results were awesome!

This year, we had three clients at the Showstoppers-produced event — HandHeld Entertainment, HobbyTron.com and ifrogz – which was held for the second year in a row at the Wynn Resort & Casino. Very classy!

Showstoppers lined-up roughly 100 companies as co-sponsors of the event, which was crazy enough. But at last count, Showstoppers had more than 1,000 RSVPs from tech journalists and analysts prior to the event.

For its part, Showstoppers put on a fantabulous event. The food was wonderful and plentiful, there were plenty of watering holes placed throughout the ballroom, and they had even gone to the trouble to make arrangements to broadcast the NCAA D-I National Championship Football game between Ohio State and the University of Florida on screens hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the hall. A nice touch for college football fanatics like myself.

At the end of it all, each of our three clients made great contacts at the show, with several nice stories already published/broadcast.

At the end of the day, I will continue to A) recommend media receptions for clients as a very cost-effective and efficient way of meeting a lot of journalists and analysts at one time, and B) definitely recommend Showstoppers as my favorite media reception producers.

Good job, Showstoppers!

The people running CES (the Consumer Electronics Association) did something right in a BIG way this year.

I got to grab my “badge holder” at the airport. Very cool.

Rather than have to muck-around with determining where at the LVCC (Las Vegas Convention Center) I had to go to grab a badge holder (and you can’t get into CES without one), the CES people decided to make it easy on us pre-registered types and allow us to snag one at the airport. That was nice!

So I made my 1 p.m. flight on Delta (SLC to LAS) today.

Unfortunately, the fact that I was at the airport early didn’t help me any we had to wait for a flight attendant to arrive on an inbound flight before we could take off. Duh!

We ended up leaving almost 90 minutes behind time.