The Forbes fab hustle for deals

Inside a giant ballroom at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, octogenarian sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer was leading a session on business partnerships. Marc Kuhn was outside, standing near a bank of coffee dispensers, hustling.

His firm, he said, would turn shipping containers into mobile farms for food deserts. At least, as of Monday.

That's when he had a random meeting with a guy he met.

"He saw I had some whiskey," Kuhn said.

"I said, 'It's sold out.' He said, 'What do you do?' "

And bang. A deal. Maybe.

"Everyone is hustling," said the 26-year-old founder of Oat Foundry, a Bensalem design-engineering firm.

Scrappiness was in the DNA of many at the Forbes Under 30 Summit, the second-annual confab run by the publishing stalwart best known for its annual list of billionaires.

This is where you see young wizards on the make.

They glided with confidence for hours Monday and Tuesday, surrounded by other ambitious twentysomethings. The uniform was tieless shirts and casual blazers for the men, three-inch heels or stylish ankle boots for the women, with a low-cut sneaker or mohawk in the mix.

All had been ordained by Forbes to make its Under 30 list, or be granted entry to its annual celebration of precocious Generation Y. These were digital-age "game-changers," as Forbes puts it.

But on the convention floor by day or at Philadelphia bars by night, many were gunning for an age-old capitalist target: Hitting it big.

"Dude, what's up with the copy machines?" was a line that made the crowd roar Monday as local venture capitalist Josh Kopelman, a forty-something, spoke alongside three younger men who run their own companies.

Kopelman told of how, long before he made a fortune selling Half.com to eBay, he told one of his employees to buy a copy machine.

Every two weeks, a new copy machine arrived, and the old one was trucked away.

His worker, Kopelman eventually discovered, had figured out a way to take advantage of a series of free, two-week trials.

"Ultimately," Kopelman said, again to laughter, "we ended up paying for the copy machine."

Billion-dollar valuations were another hot topic, given how they have become a vanity milestone.

Kopelman and others dismissed them as meaningless.

The real value of a young business, they said, is whether work is being done day to day to adapt as a company grows, and not losing the start-up edge as money rolls in.

At a panel on the difficulties facing women trying to raise funds for their businesses, similar assessments were made.

"A ton of the unicorns in the market now are gonna die," said Sarah Kunst, 29, a partner with Fortis Partners, "because their companies don't have any actual inherent value."

Compared to men, women have a really hard time winning financing for their businesses. The data show this. But Kunst said standing out could help.

"Make yourself really interesting when you're Googled," Kunst said.

mpanaritis@phillynews.com

215-854-2431 @Panaritism