How to Fly with Angel Investors

You’ve got an ambitious business idea, done your initial research, started developing your product and you need some investment to finish building it and take it to market. This is a common situation for young entrepreneurs to find themselves in.

In this article, we’ll explore one potential solution: Angel Investors. These are usually wealthy entrepreneurs who are looking to invest their own money in early-stage businesses. In addition to offering your business money, they can also offer their advice, experience and knowledge.

[Note: my advice throughout this article is tailored towards raising money from UK-based Angel Investors, however many of the principles apply elsewhere]

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The European Ecosystem is Entering Puberty

I just read Mike Butcher’s post entitled What is the future for tech VCs in Europe? and thought I’d share a few of my predictions of what I believe is likely to happen in Europe over the next few years; hopefully the predictions will serve to explain my rather crude choice of blog post title.

1. European entrepreneurs will become more sophisticated.

• The annual Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford conference which has been running since 2000 started being copied in Cambridge and London last year — and more people’s lives will change as a result. Having met several of the most successful entrepreneurs and investors from the Valley at the events in 2006 and 2007, I have some insight into the power it is having. A couple of friends of mine whose lifes have changed as a result are:
  
  Bob Goodson
  Bob met Max Levchin for the first time in 2004 and was headhunted to move to Silicon Valley 3 months later in order to become employee #1 at Yelp. Having helped take Yelp through to taking on $16M venture capital funding and over 4M monthly uniques, Bob recently left to found YouNoodle with Kirill Makharinsky, who was also headhunted by Levchin as an Oxford student.

  Kulveer Taggar
  Kulveer met Evan Williams for the first time in 2005 and was soon persuaded to quit his job at Deutsche Bank and go full-time on BOSO in March 2006. After getting selected for Y Combinator in 2007, transferring what he’d learnt to Auctomatic and teaming up with Irish hacker Patrick Collison, subsequently raising investment from Chris Sacca and Paul Buchheit, his company was acquired by Live Current Media for $5M last month.

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Seedcamp Video

I just came across a video looking back at Seedcamp week along with Saul and Reshma’s vision for the program moving forwards. Being asked to write a motivational post for the Seedcamp blog back in November was a real honour, and it’s inspirational to see what these guys are doing for the European ecosystem:

Silicon Where? (Part 3)

What the chance encounter with Eddie Codel and the subsequent LunchMeet interview interview really highlights is the way that things “just happen” in Silicon Valley. Due to the higher density of people working in start-ups, the probability of randomly bumping into someone useful is higher than anywhere else in the world. Whether it’s funding, a new employee, press coverage or just good, solid advice that one is looking for, it might well be waiting just around the corner. This is not to say one can’t start companies elsewhere, it just means that it’s often easier in the Valley.

Accelerating the start-up process is early-stage investment fund Y Combinator, set up in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris. The concept is that around 8 founder teams are selected to work in Cambridge, MA each summer and Mountain View, CA each winter. They then embark on a 3-month process involving a “Demo Day” in week 6 and an “Investor Day” in week 10. During the 3 months, the participants are networked in with many of the top Internet entrepreneurs through master classes, dinners and various other events involving product, marketing and legal experts. Invariably, this results in all the teams receiving substantial funding and going on to form successful companies.

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