In my course that teaches the “flavors of capital” we dedicate a large segment to understanding early-stage equity financing: aka angel and venture capital. Below are links to a video that walks you through a quick, inside view of how this flavor of capital operates, what incentives are at work, and how best to optimize [...]
Conventional wisdom is that, generally speaking, geek CEOs are a Bad Idea. Serial entrepreneur and entrepreneurship educator extraordinaire Steve Blank disagrees… How Scientists and Engineers Got It Right, and VC’s Got It Wrong Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. It might be its [...]
Last week students in my Intro to Entrepreneurship course were working through the Startup Marketing lecture. There was a delightful discussion afterwards as the students explored the idea of “positioning.” This is a topic that was very tricky for me until a wise mentor showed me a trick that plays a central role in the [...]
A nice interview (written AND video) with an angel investor sharing his top five best practices for securing angel capital. Find it at: http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/06/interview-angel-investors-five-keys-raising-capital/
If your angel group doesn’t know about the Power Of Angel Investing seminars, you should. These are structured, well-tested programs that can help the angels in your group, and the group itself, significantly increase their ability, and confidence, to execute deals.
Thanks to an interesting NYT article, I learned of the Pipeline Fund, an organization dedicated to helping aspiring women angels become extremely succesful women angels investing in woman-backed social ventures… The overwhelmingly male field of angel investing is about to become a bit more diverse. Ten women, including some business owners (TechCrunch has the full [...]
This isn’t how I would recommend you use crowdsourcing to help your portfolio, but interesting none-the-less… A Monaco-based Angel investor has asked users of Google+ to vote for their favourite Web-based start-up that publishes their pitch on Google Plus, and he will invest $10,000 in the most popular. Full Story: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/7/prweb8642745.htm
Video Games are not often a topic of deep analysis and respectful dialog… or at least they didn’t used to be. Now people like NPR’s On The Media are doing excellent coverage that shows not just the cons, but some of the amazing benefits, that this new entertainment/art form has to offer. According to the [...]
"It is not the way the scribes of yore would have done it but Iceland is tearing up the rulebook by drawing up its new constitution throughcrowdsourcing." Full Story at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/09/iceland-crowdsourcing-constitution-facebook
In preparation for our upcoming strategy retreat for my angel group I have spoken with a dozen leaders of angel groups, mostly from the Northeast but also from other parts of the country. This blog post quickly summarizes that research and points to blog posts that expand on each topic in detail. I hope [...]
