All Entries in the "Picking Winners" Category

Shark Tank (Part 2): 5 Things the Show Gets Right

[Guest post by Brant Bukowsky, the founder of GrowthPartner.com -- a firm that provides angel investment and online marketing expertise to emerging companies. A serial entrepreneur, Bukowsky and his team have built three Inc. 500 companies in the last five years. He blogs at Angel Investment Journal.]

This is the second in a two-part series.

In Part [...]

Thealzel Lee of VANTEC: Backing Life Sciences Companies

What’s it like to back a life sciences company? What should investors expect before investing in the bio/health sectors? Who’s entitled to be called an “angel investor”?
These are some of the questions Thealzel Lee will answer in this interview.
Lee is the senior partner of Rocket Builders, a management consulting firm that sponsors Vancouver Angel Technology [...]

Angel Investing: Dilution Preventive Measures (Part 3)

This is Part 3 of our quest to answer a reader’s question on dilution.
The reader writes -
How do you prevent being washed out as you keep pro-rata and the numbers get increasingly bigger?
Suppose you invest $200k for 25%. The venture then raises $5m, so to keep pro rata you do $1.25m of that round. Then [...]

2010: The Ultimate Buyer’s Market for Investors

No doubt, 2009 was a year of dieting and fat-trimming for startups. But those that have conquered the financial tsunami will come out a lean, mean, revenue-ramping machine.
“2010 should be the ultimate buyers’ market for investors with cash to spend because entrepreneurs who tightened their belts last year cannot do so indefinitely,” Steve Fredrick and [...]

Startup Team That Adds the Steam

An age old question: Would you back an A-team with a B-idea or a B-team with an A-idea?
An A-team with an A-idea, of course! Duh.
In all seriousness, investors often bet more on the jockey than on the horse. If they had to choose, most would opt for an A-team with a B-idea than a weak [...]

Investing in iPhone Startups (Part 2): The VC Way

We’ve looked at the stats and prospects of iPhone, iPod Touch, and App Store in Investing in iPhone Startups (Part 1): The Prospects. The numbers are encouraging and the downloads are downright inspiring (3 billion and growing with no end in sight).
BUT, barriers to entry is low and there are heaps of other issues to [...]

Become an Angel Investor in 2010: An HBS Framework

It’s true that the global economic downturn has clipped many an angel’s wings. Recalling our previous post, Interesting Finding on Angel Investments in 2009, total angel investments in the first half of 2009 stood at US$9.1 billion, representing a decline of 27% over the first half of 2008.
The gloomy economic environment and depressing exit opportunities [...]

Rob Delman of Golden Seeds: Pitch Preparation Tips for Angels

[Guest post by Rob Delman, a professional angel investor and an active member of Golden Seeds in New York. He is proud to be nicknamed the “Golden Dude” by his female forum mates.]
As an angel investor, have you ever sat in a room listening to a pitch and have had no idea what the entrepreneur [...]

Ideas Don’t Need to Be Complex to Be Good

Have you ever examined an entrepreneur’s business plan or sat through a pitch and wondered why it has to be so complicated?
Does the idea need to be complex to be good?
In our recent post, Angels and Startups, Turn a MISS Into a Hit, this exact question was put on the table.
The quintessential examples of how [...]

Building and Backing Startups in a Recession

With the economic climate being heavy on the minds of investors, it is important to remember that a time of recession is not always doom and gloom. A great number of successful companies got their first boost towards success during a recession. Companies such as Apple, Atari, and Oracle all began their steady climb to [...]