Do you have what it takes?

"Bootcamp for Startups" enlists plenty of entrepreneurs looking to be whipped into shape.

By Scott Kirsner

Oct 8, 1999 | When I was a kid growing up in Miami, my father, hoping to encourage my interest in writing, would take me to see authors read from their books. I remember seeing literary lights as diverse as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Dave Barry, Ted Koppel and James Michener. Toward the end of each evening, the master of ceremonies would indicate that it was time to take questions from the audience. After I had been to one or two of these events, this announcement began to make me cringe, and I could usually detect a bit of ill-concealed apprehensiveness in the visiting author as well.

Audience members would line up behind a microphone in the aisle. Some would inevitably be clutching brown envelopes stuffed with copies of their novels, which they intended to thrust into the hands of the visiting author before the night was through. This was the mid-1980s, when having a book on the bestseller list was still a viable way to achieve celebrity in America. These people wanted an agent, a contract, a publisher, and they would ask questions that struck me, even in my early teens, as incredibly inane:

"Do you use a typewriter or a word processor, or do you write longhand?"

"Should you bind a manuscript when you send it to an agent?"

"What weight of paper do you use?"

"Whats the ideal length for a book proposal?"

The visiting author would answer the questions as diplomatically and patiently as he could, though a few would protest that the particulars of paper weight and line spacing werent factors in landing an agent or publisher. Still, the audience members would go home, pleased that they had been let in on a few of the secrets to becoming a Published Writer.

I was transported back to those author Q&A's this week, when I attended the Bootcamp for Startups in Wellesley, Mass., just west of Boston.

The event, organized by Garage.com, a Palo Alto company that helps connect young, primarily tech-focused companies with investors, was held at Babson College -- a school known for its entrepreneurship programs. Babson, located in the wealthy Boston suburbs, feels not like an army base, but a miniature version of Harvard. There are lush expanses of perfectly mowed grass separating federal-style brick buildings, their white cupolas topped with light green, oxidized copper caps.

Attendees converging on Babson for the Bootcamp for Startups were promised "a conference featuring an established network of industry experts, insiders, venture capitalists, and angel investors." Mostly, it seemed, they were interested in those last two.

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