Given the considerable interest I’ve had in the AngelsWanted idea I thought many of you wound be interested in this panel discussion. Guy Kawasaki is the moderator and the panel includes:
- Andy Bechtolsheim. - a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Then he founded Granite Systems (gigabit Ethernet switches) which Cisco bought. Then he founded Kealia (server technology) which Sun bought. He was also the first investor in Google when he wrote a check for Larry and Sergei in 1998—before they had a bank account to deposit it in.
- Ron Conway. the former managing partner of Angel Investors LP. He has invested in over 500 startups and has personal investments in RockYou, Twitter, Plaxo, Digg, and DanceJam. He is also an advisor to FaceBook. He was also an early investor in Google.
- Dr. Ian Sobieski. Ian is a founder and managing director of the Band of Angels Fund which is a $50 million fund that receives approximately 100 pitches per month. The fund has invested in 240 companies and has had more than forty profitable acquisition exits and nine IPOs.
In short, these guys make the “angels” on Dragon’s Den look like amateurs.
The Global Technology Symposium hosted the panel on February 1, 2008 in Palo Alto, California. The panel’s premise was simple: Why bother impressing venture capitalists when (a) it takes less money to start a company and (b) there are plenty of angels who will fund early-stage deals? Here are some of highlights that Guy Kawasaki picked out:
- You can’t reach these angels by sending them an email out of the blue.
- They want to read a one-page executive summary and not much more.
- They decide whether they like a company in the first thirty seconds— think HotorNot, not eHarmony.
- They don’t rely upon business plans for due diligence.
- They seldom serve on boards or do “heavy lifting” for a company.
He goes on to say angel capital is like “HotorNot” - an interesting description!
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