Angel Investment Journal - Angel Investing and Entrepreneur Blog

Gigaom has a post discussing Lookery’s recent round of funding that was raised entirely from Angel’s. Lookery’s CEO, Scott Rafer (former CEO of MyBlogLog), talked about 5 reasons why getting angel investing is better than VC money:

1) Focus. “Angels can concentrate on the individual strategy of your company, rather than the larger portfolio management strategy a VC must bear in mind.”

2) Deal Terms. Angels generally don’t demand as much in liquidation preferences and other deal terms.

3) Future Funding Rounds. You will generally have more control over future negotiations in getting additional funding.

4) Transactional Control. “You won’t have to seek permission from investors who aren’t on your board or worry about what a VC needs to have happen vis á vis managing his limited partners… Angels have no LPs, so their agendas tend to be far more transparent.”

5) Exit. “Angels aren’t compensated in ratios. Angels get 100 percent of the profit they generate with their investment in your company. A VC only gets a fraction of the ‘carry’ generated on your deal. This is one reason a VC might be motivated to urge you to sell bigger.”

Rob Conway, a well known “super angel”, follows up with 3 more reasons why Angel money is more attractive than VC money.

1) The due diligence process will be less rigorous since angels are acting in their own interest and not investing OPM (other people’s money).

2) Angels are generally more vertical specialists than compared to VC’s.

3) “Angels have one-degree of separation from people in their professional network — not two, or three, or four. But because angels tend to be operational types, the business relationships they bring to the table are personal, not transactional. ”

Finally, Allan Leinwand, follows up with a counterpoint on why Entrepreneurs should prefer VC money over angel money. He claims VC’s will be better able to stick with the startup over the long term, if things don’t work out quickly. However, Tom Perkins, of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says they put companies in the “ICU” if they are not performing well. They either see if they can get out of it or they shut off everything right away.

The Seattle PI posts an article posing the question whether the market conditions will negatively affect angel investing.

Investors are likely to get more cautious as the market suffers since they are seeing their investments in the market decline. However, regardless of the economy, it is never a bad time to start a company. Markets are cyclical and it is unlikely you will achieve great success within a short time frame. There is a good chance that once things get going for your company, the markets will have shown some improvement. (I am not trying to predict the markets here, but throughout history after every down turn, there is at least some sort of up turn.)

Inc Magazine had an article a few months ago about this topic - Starting Up in a Down Economy. They mention several reasons for why a down market is a good time to start:

So market conditions should not deter entrepreneurs from making the decision to start a company. And even though some angel investors may be a but cautious, there are plenty of others that are always looking for good companies regardless of market conditions.

Trevor Blackwell has an interesting post on how some companies generate creative myths for how they started their companies in order to generate publicity.

Ebay and the pez dispenser myth comes to mind as an example.

This was a quote by Michael Phelps coach, Bob Bowman when talking about Phelps’ (and his fellow swimmer’s) training regime. Bowman not only trains Olympic swimmers but he also trains thoroughbred racehorses.

I liked that quote because it shows that the people at the top of their sport don’t get their by genetics or luck (although both of those would help). Those people, more likely than not, train much harder than the rest of the field.

I get to hear a lot of ideas from people wanting to start a company. The vast majority of the time, people want to start a “sexy” business. Whether that be the current hot online trend (at least half of the ideas I hear related to the web involve some sort of social networking) or even something more simple like starting a bar.

The problem with sexy businesses is that a lot of people are going after them because simply as a result of them being sexy or exciting. But those businesses are generally highly competitive as a result of the vast number of people going after them because of their appeal.

If you are trying to start an online business similar to what 1,000 other people are doing, you need to have a something remarkable or meet a demand no one else is meeting, which is more likely going to be a specific niche.

People also generally go after the sexy business ideas because that is what they hear about in the media. They hear about valuations and acquisitions of these companies that seem exciting. But I see many, many hundreds of million dollar deals with companies no one ever hears of and many times it is because the business is not exciting/sexy.

Look for that path less traveled.

My advice

Robert Robinson, founder of the Hawaii Angels, gave a session on negotiating at the recent ACA Summit.

The following are some brief notes from his session:

-Angels need to negotiate in the following areas-
Expectations
Process
Term sheet
Communications
Portfolio Governance
Follow on Financing
Exit

-Your negotiating strength is proportional to the value of your alternatives AND inversely proportional to the value of their alternatives.

-“Principles unite and numbers divide.” Don’t talk numbers in the early stages. Talk about the vision for the company over the next year and beyond or related topics. Once you start talking valuation you are in adversarial position from then going forward.

-Many times entrepreneurs get too concerned about getting too diluted. However, dilution is not the worst thing that can happen to entrepreneur. The most proximate cause of company death is running out of cash.

I just returned from the Angel Capital Association Summit in San Diego. It was a great event and would highly recommend it to all angel investors. David Berkus who is widely known for his contributions to the Angel community as well as for his method of valuating companies – the “Berkus Method” gave a presentation on boards that was excellent.

Some quick notes from his talk:

-Every board needs an audit committee and compensation committee. Other committees could also be beneficial, but it is on a case by case basis.

-A general guideline of board compensation is 1 percent that is vested over 2-4 years.

-The boards of small companies should focus the spending where there is a demand pull. Don’t go in direction of using ‘cost push’ to determine spending. This is where the CEO says where he thinks costs should go. Instead, find where demand is pulling on company and go in that direction. Try to “expand the runway” in the direction of this “demand pull”.

You may want to check out his book “Extending the Runway” which discusses Boards (all of his proceeds go to the Boys Scouts of America). I spoke with Frank Peters after the session. He said he and Dave may do a show expanding on this presentation which will get into some war stories about being on boards.

Recently I have come across a few different instances of people talking about when not to start a business (E-Myth Revisited and Scott Shane talking about his book while
on The Frank Peters Show). It is a topic that does not get much coverage, probably because most entrepreneurial-types like to read things to motivate and inspire them, not things that dissuade them from going after their dreams.

It is an important concept because starting a new venture is going to require a significant amount of time and possibly a significant amount of capital. So it is vital to make sure the resources you are dedicating to it are going to be on something worthwhile.

My freshman year in college, I wanted to start a sno-cone stand. I grew up in St. Louis which has an abundance of sno-cone stands all over the place doing consistent business. In my college town, just two hours from St. Louis, there was not a single one. I was pretty confident I could start a stand and make money from it. Twelve years later, I am pretty sure it would have made money, but it would have been a foolish use of resources. Instead, my brother convinced me to go after another business we had just started in the ticket industry. That company eventually grew to a $22 million company before it was acquired. If I had started a sno-cone stand, maybe I could have expanded and had a few locations. Maybe I could have franchised it or found an exciting niche in the industry that could have been big, but the chances of it being as big as the ticket industry were very slim. And there is no way I could have gone after both businesses to the extent that was required for success.

This isn’t meant to get you to think too much about your idea before going after it. Thinking too much is a major reason people never start a business. They do too much thinking and not enough action. The point is that you should be sure to think big. If your idea has big potential then take action (DIFN) and try to validate your idea as cheaply and quickly as possible.

A while ago I pointed out some interesting entrepreneur and investor podcasts, but I only recently started listening to The Frank Peters Show. If you are an angel investor, I would highly recommend subscribing to the podcast. It is put together very well, it is informative, and he has some excellent guests on the show.

I was at InvestMidwest this week and saw some really exciting companies. I was impressed by the presentations and it seems many of the presenters were either coached on what their presentation should include or they just intelligent entrepreneurs that knew what needed to be done.

Most presentations I see include one aspect that is so common it has started to frustrate me. It happens when the presenter gets to the part of the presentation about projections. They start talking about revenue projections and they present the figures, but say that they believe this projections to be “conservative”.

I don’t know why it frustrates me, but apparently I am not the only one that feels this way. Fortunately, I only heard one entrepreneur (out of 12) claim their projections were conservative. And, upon hearing this, I saw another investor look at his buddy and smile.

Why shouldn’t you use the word “conservative” when talking about your projections?

First, when coming up with projections, especially if you are a start-up, it is extremely hard to predict what you could actually do. But you should do whatever you can to support your projections. So don’t try to say you just need to get 1% of a gigantic market in order to experience huge success. Talk about what aspect of that market you expect to penetrate. But since it is so hard to predict, you probably don’t know what is conservative and what isn’t.

Second, why would an entrepreneur that is trying to “sell” the concept of his business and raise money quote conservative numbers? It is unlikely you would, so don’t try to make the projections look bigger than what you actually believe.

Finally, even if your numbers are conservative, don’t use the word “conservative”. Don’t qualify your projections at all or maybe use a different word like “realistic” if you actually believe those projections are within reach.