From the category archives:
Today’s a good day to post on my angel investment experience, because this afternoon I’ll be speaking to a group on this subject in Corvallis, Oregon. What I want to do is just describe how it went for me, one set of eyes, one viewpoint, without making any generalizations about the rest of the world [...]
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Ever since I started in high tech in 1979, angel investment has been an amorphous, thoroughly disorganized, ad-hoc phenomenon that occurred somewhere between friends and family, on one end of a scale, and with venture capital, on the other. It was hard to find and hard to describe. People were selling lists of angel investors to entrepreneurs [...]
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Every startup has its own natural level of startup costs. It’s built into the circumstances, like strategy, location, and resources. Call it the natural startup level; or maybe the sweet spot.
1. The Plan
For example, Mabel’s Thai restaurant in San Francisco is going to need about $950,000, while Ralph’s new catering business needs only about $50,000. [...]
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Craig from trackster.com asked me last week in a comment he added to my Willamette Angel Conference post:
I was wondering with all these business plan competitions that you judge, how many winners or even non winners have you seen turn into successful companies? Are there any examples that you could give?
Yes, a lot of these [...]
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Today I’ll be listening to pitches at the Willamette Valley Angel Conference, voting on which of them ends up with the $125K investment.
I’m one of 25 members. We started with 43 plans and narrowed them down to five finalists. We’ve broken into groups and done additional work on each of the finalists. Today we hear [...]
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Adeo Ressi doesn’t like what he calls a slanted field on the deals entrepreneurs get from investors. He says (I’m quoting):
Honestly, I think that the entrepreneur gets a raw deal today, and that this has gotten a lot worse since I started in 1994. Entrepreneurs are victims of a lot of predatory and exploitative behavior.
This [...]
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Imagine, if you will, this scene:
You are in a group of angel investors talking with entrepreneurs looking for funding. Or you are in a group of venture competition judges giving feedback to teams after the judging is over. The entrepreneurs listen intently, nod, they’re understanding, and then suddenly one or more of their faces change, [...]
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(I posted Organizing Angel Investors Monday on Up and Running about positive developments in angel funding. David Rose, CEO of angelsoft.net, added the following as a comment to that post. Although I haven’t had guest posts on this blog, David’s comment is worth it. And I’ve been using angelsoft.net for a while now, I know [...]
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Business plans everywhere. I’m reading, annotating, filling in score sheets, and getting cranky. I explained that on this blog last Monday.
So what’s with the unrealistically high profitability projections? This year it seems like I’ve discovered a new 50-50 rule of profitability in business plans, as in, 50% of the plans I’m looking at project 50% [...]
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