• 4 ways to get automatically rejected by an angel investor | VentureBeat
  I’ve started three companies, and now I’m an angel investor. So I’ve been on both sides of the table. There are lots of good articles out there about pitching, and surely everyone who pitches me has read some of them. Still, a few problems appear over and over again. If you’ve ever had to sort through resumes and cover letters, you’ve seen this effect: People tend to have the same misconceptions and therefore make the same mistakes. What follows are four problems I see all the time, each of which makes me roll my eyes and sometimes even terminate the conversation early.
• 4 MORE ways to get automatically rejected by an angel investor | VentureBeat
  As someone who has both sought venture capital and distributed it, I’m lucky to have a pretty unique perspective on what works and doesn’t work. As I mentioned in the first part of this list, the mistakes don’t seem to change over time. And people who make them often walk away not only empty handed, but clueless about what killed their chances of getting funding.
  (tags: entrepreneurship startup business tips angels vc fundraising entrepreneur)
• Angel Investor Network Wider Wake Launches With a Splash | Search Journal
  Specializing in the digital media industry, Wider Wake Networks, Inc. (www.widerwake.net) today announced the launch of its angel investment network, with a focus on investing their knowledge, experience and connections, not simply cash.

  Wider Wake's investment strategy is positioned differently from other early stage investment organizations in that its members take active roles in developing businesses at the earliest stages and assist portfolio companies in launching and growing operations. In addition, Wider Wake members advise on structure at founding and subsequent fundraising, as well as launch and growth strategy, sales and marketing, technology and human resources, among other areas of expertise.

• http://bit.ly/2UB2Jj
  Much like the majority of the economy, angel investments have felt the crunch of 2009. In fact, according to a University of New Hampshire Center for Venture Research analysis, The Angel Investor Market in Q1Q2 2009: A Halt in the Market Contraction, total investments are down 27% over the first half of 2008.

   

  The interesting finding from this analysis is that while overall investment dollars are down, the total number of ventures that received funding in the same period increased 6% over last year. The number of active investors in the first half of 2009 was virtually unchanged from 2008.

• Tindall appointed as ‘NZ Arch Angel’ | Stuff.co.nz
  Sir Stephen Tindall, founder of The Warehouse, has been appointed the first “New Zealand Arch Angel” by an organisation for angel investors in this country.

   

  Sir Stephen Tindall, founder of The Warehouse, has been appointed the first “New Zealand Arch Angel” by an organisation for angel investors in this country.

  The Angel Association of New Zealand said Tindall had invested more than $150 million in seed and venture capital companies.

  An angel investor is described as an affluent individual who provides capital for a business start-up.

• Angel Investor Group Maverick Angels Aligns With Major European Bank | Yacht Vacations & Charters
  Maverick Angels, a leading Southern California-based angel investment group, announced today its alliance with Intesa SanPaolo Bank, Italy’s largest bank and among the largest financial institutions in Europe to create a new angel investor network based in Milan.

   

  “We are very pleased to work together with Intesa SanPaolo on this important and vital new start-up initiative. We welcome the opportunity to bring our dynamic angel investment model to launch and successfully build a new entrepreneurial ecosystem in Italy,” says John Dilts, Founder and President of Maverick Angels.

• Tech Coast Angels honors late founder with fellowship
  The endowment for a UCI MBA candidate will bear the name of recently deceased entrepreneur Luis Villalobos.
  (tags: angel angelinvestor techcoastangels)

I am pleased to note that the late founder of Tech Coast Angels, Louis Villalobos, is being honored with a fellowship. Louis was an icon in the Angel group community and will be missed.

UC Irvine Merage School of Business and Irvine-based Tech Coast Angels, the largest angel investor group in the U.S., announced the formation of an endowed fellowship fund to honor one of its founders, Luis Villalobos, who died Oct. 1. The fellowship will be awarded to an MBA candidate at UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business.

For more information, please see: http://www.ocmetro.com/t-TCA_honors_founder_with_fellowship_11_5_09.aspx

• Greylock Partners recruits LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, raises $575M fund | VentureBeat
  Reid Hoffman, the founder and chairman of popular professional networking site LinkedIn, is joining venture firm Greylock Partners as an investing partner. The firm also announced today that it has raised a $575 million fund, its thirteenth.

  More concretely, Hoffman said he plans to maintain the same level of involvement in LinkedIn, while shifting the time he spends on angel investing to Greylock. Sze pointed to Greylock partner Aneel Bhusri, who also serves as co-CEO at Workday, as a demonstration that these time-splitting arrangements can work.

• The Daily Start-Up: CIT Spells Bankruptcy – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ
  Time To Get That Halo – With commercial and venture capital lending drastically down (CIT case in point…), now may be the time to become an angel investor, according to The Wall Street Journal. Of course angel-dom is not for the faint of heart, as the Small Business Administration reports that roughly half of new businesses fail within their first five years, and researchers estimate that half of all angel investments lose money, with 48% of investments resulting in a 100% loss.
  (tags: angel wsj angelinvestor venturecapitaldispatch)

Founded in 1997, the Angel Forum ™ – Vancouver, Canada introduces emerging companies to private equity Angel Investors and Venture Capital funds. As the oldest & largest angel network in Western Canada with 60+ investors, their primary objective is to facilitate investment in emerging companies. They are supported by leading organizations in BC and belong to Canada’s National Angel Capital Organization and the Angel Capital Association (USA).  Presenting companies have raised over $26 million directly through the Forum. Since 1998, they have offered Investor Ready ™ workshops for companies and investors.

Register by November 7th for the 26th Angel Forum on November 24, 2009, and meet 20 to 30 companies (10+ already selected) while networking with other investors (30+ already registered).  If you have not received a registration confirmation, please reply.

Note:

• Annual Members register just once for all Angel Forums until August 31, 2010 for $175 ($100 for Nov.24 only).
• Annual Members can bring an investor friend (new to the forum) at no cost, to each Angel Forum.
• Annual Members can register for ~ 10% less for upcoming Angel Capital Overview workshop on Jan 19, 2010.

Some time ago, Russell Garland of the Wall Street Journal blog Venture Capital Dispatch posted an entry titled Small Is Beautiful for VC 2.0 Firms, which discusses the idea of small, capital-efficient venture funds among technology investors.  Highlights include:

“It’s a best-practices sharing in a collegial atmosphere combined with some co-investing, more or less based on people’s expertise and strengths,” said Arthur Marks, a general partner at Valhalla Partners, who founded the group along with Stewart Alsop of Alsop Louie Partners.

The VC2.0 model is a “small, focused firm that’s not trying to bend the natural rules of gravity around capital under management,” said Brian Jacobs, one of the organizers of the New York event and a general partner at Emergence Capital Partners, which is investing from its $200 million second fund.

• The Friday Five: Boston's Tech Super-Connectors – Innovation Economy – Boston.com
  The Friday Five is a list of five things worth knowing about… and in the comments, lots more things that you add.

  This week, it's five people I consider "super-connectors" in the Boston tech start-up scene. How do I define a super-connector?

  - They have an amazingly vast network
  - They're not reclusive: you're likely to see them out and about at networking events
  - They're generous about making introductions for you if they believe in your idea

On October 23rd, Jonathan Chevreau wrote a column in the Financial Post titled Labour-Sponsored Funds: The Tail That Wags The Dog.  With the phase-out of tax credits for such funds in Ontario, their generally negative returns and their high management expense ratios, controversy has arisen over them and the freezes on redemptions that some fund managers are imposing.  For anyone in the early-stage investment sector, this article is worth reading.

• Berkonomics – Business Insights from Dave Berkus -
  We must pause in this journey toward building an overwhelmingly successful business with an admonition that may seem obvious to some and completely sail over the heads of others. Most entrepreneurs arrive at the starting line of a new business with a vision for the future and some degree of experience from the past. Often, that experience comes from being employed within a business that was similar, but whose senior management may have missed or deliberately ignored what the entrepreneur sees as a great opportunity.
  (tags: angel integrity customerlists entreprenur employmentlaw)
• David B. Lerner: New York City’s Academic Institutions: A Stunning Engine of Innovation
  Many of us who have the distinct pleasure to live and work in New York’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and/or Silicon Alley have no inkling of the staggering role its local academic institutions play in the realm of innovation, licensing, and start-up formation. I can tell you that until approximately six years ago I had no idea of the sheer scale of it all. It is certainly true that the majority of this output is in the realm of health sciences/biotech, but much is being done to stimulate entrepreneurship from engineering, computer science departments, the undergraduate ranks and the business schools.
  (tags: entrepreneur entrepreneurship angelinvestor vc university)