Posts tagged ‘Angel investor’

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May 13, 2013

SI2013 – Speaker Profile – Angela Jackson

Angela Jackson

Angela Jackson

We are keeping with the theme of Angel investors following yesterday’s post about John Sechrest. I got connected to Angela Jackson through Helga Waage of Mobilitus, a startup from Iceland that is growing at an impressive pace and has an office in Portland, Oregon. Angela brings a decade’s experience placing 30+ angel investments (multiple sectors) and a serial entrepreneur family history to Portland Seed Fund. She has advised hundreds of entrepreneurs and seed‐stage companies across a broad spectrum of industries at AB Jackson Group, and also oversees the Portland State University Business Accelerator, with 25+ resident bio-tech, technology and clean-tech companies. She is current President of the Portland chapter of Keiretsu Forum, the largest angel network in the world, and was Chair of the state’s premier angel investment event, Angel Oregon, in 2010. I am looking forward to hearing her survivability story as an Angel investor and what keeps her doing what she does and also learn about how she got started, or more importantly why she got started as an Angel Investor.

Angela and John, are at the core of building startup communities. There are a bunch of people of Iceland who are doing the same things as what Angela and John do, but they have not followed through in getting the story told. I believe strongly that there are many success stories in Iceland, maybe not Billion $ exits but through Angel and Seed Funding companies reaching a point of self sufficiency where the Entrepreneur has created something of value. There are many local businesses and services that have been around for many decades and they all once were a startup. The city of Reykjavik or Akranes or Akureyri were once startups in their own right.

Coming back to our theme of the conference Building Antifragile Startup Communities, I read a very interesting blog post titled “Antifragile Book Notes” by Taylor Pearson for the “Antifragile” book by Mr. Taleb, who has accepted to be on live broadcast through the Internet during the conference on June 4th provided the technology works and we are able to make the technology work fingers crossed. Anyways, coming back to the book, there are two ideas that falls squarely into Angel investing, Entrepreneurship and Startups, they are:

The Barbell Strategy

A dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas (robust to negative Black Swans) and taking a lot of small risks in others (open to positive Black Swans), hence achieving antifragility. That is extreme risk aversion on one side and extreme risk loving on the other, rather than just the “medium” or the beastly “moderate” risk attitude that in fact is a sucker game

Antifragility is the combination aggressiveness plus paranoia— clip your downside, protect yourself from extreme harm, and let the upside, the positive Black Swans, take care of itself. We saw Seneca’s asymmetry: more upside than downside can come simply from the reduction of extreme downside (emotional harm) rather than improving things in the middle.

An example is Mark Cuban’s investment strategy. He keeps most of his assets in cash (robust, not going to crash with the market) and it allows him to move quickly when he sees large opportunities (anti fragile).

Optionality

Options, any options, by allowing you more upside than downside, are vectors of antifragility.

If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur. (The key is that your assessment doesn’t need to be made beforehand, only after the outcome.)

Option = asymmetry + rationality

The mechanism of optionlike trial and error (the fail-fast model), a.k.a. convex tinkering. Low-cost mistakes, with known maximum losses, and large potential payoff (unbounded). A central feature of positive Black Swans.

Central to optionality is Taleb’s assertion that prediction in the modern world is impossible. Instead of trying to predict what is going to happen, position yourself in such a way that you have optionality. That way whatever happens, all you have to do is evaluate it once you have all the information and make a rational decision.

If you have not read the book, I highly recommend it as I have done before many time :)

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May 12, 2013

SI2013 – Speaker Profile – John Sechrest

johnsechrest_headshotI got connected to John through Kristjan Freyr Kristjanson, CEO of Innovit+Klak and who runs Startup Weekend in Iceland. I had always felt that what we lacked in Iceland was broader participation of investors and mentors in the Startup community. John has been solving that problem in Seattle and in the greater Washington state. I am excited to hear about how he has been able to get new Angels to invest into the startup companies. I am also really excited by the philosophy that John has put into practice through his Seattle Angels Network. Startup companies need a lot of due diligence and investors need to play a role in actually helping the startup get off the ground. I believe strongly that Investor group has to work as hard as the Entrepreneur to make the startup a success. I have been writing about Brad Feld, Brad Burnham and Fred Wilson, in my opinion the successful venture investors work much harder than any entrepreneur I know. Check out the documentary “Something Ventured“, it is obvious how much effort the early VCs started to invest much like Angel investors and how much effort they put into each of the companies that they invested in. I think the advent of the Investment Management profession has killed the spirit of each and everyone to become an investor and entrepreneur. I think we have some really smart people working in the Investment management and Asset management business but I don’t think Investment is something that we should outsource. By getting involved with early stage companies with the partnership of experienced angel investors and investor mentors I believe anyone and everyone can invest in Startups and be successful. Don’t believe the fear mongering that your Financial Advisor gives you, Risk is misunderstood consistently by everyone so Investment or Fund managers are no different or better than any of us.

Anyways, I have digressed enough. The post was about John, John Sechrest is the founder of the Seattle Angel Conference and the Willamette Angel Conference, each providing a venue for new angel investors to explore the process. He is a co-organizer of the Lean Startup Seattle, helping entrepreneurs get focused on stronger company processes. As a global facilitator for Startup Weekend, he has worked with several communities take a step forward on entrepreneurial ecosystem development. The motivation to get John to visit Iceland and participate in Startup Iceland is to bring some knowledge on how we can create an Effective Angel Investor community here. I want to expand on the idea that John and other successful Angels have created. Maybe we will launch as I had wrote about before an Accelerator for Investors so young and new investors can get started early and participate in building an Antifragile Startup Community in Iceland.

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March 18, 2013

Startup Weekend Reykjavik

Startup Weekend Reykjavik happend this last weekend. I volunteered again as a mentor and it was a lot of fun.

Source: iceland.startupweekend.org

Source: iceland.startupweekend.org

This time around the organizing team at Innovit had brought an external facilitator from the UK, and I was also impressed that the organizing team nudged the participants to aggregate around ideas that actually had some meat in the bones. In the previous few Startup Weekend that I have participated in Iceland, the challenge has been that some of the team members were married to their idea but the idea did not have a big enough market or potential of becoming a business. Anyways, the teams that were working on the ideas this time had some programming resources with them and some designers. It was obvious as they could actually develop the websites and have some working apps within the 54 hours of the weekend. There were 13 teams presenting at the end of the day, I met with most of them and talked to all of them and I learnt a lot and I was tempted to write a check to a couple of the teams, but realized that it would be too soon and the teams were not ready for that. I intend to follow up with the teams to see how they are doing and who knows maybe I will invest :)

Here is the coverage of the event in Icelandic, It was great to see a lot more mentors participate in the event.

Source: MBL.is

Source: MBL.is

I think what is missing is if an Angel Investor would show up and write a check at the end of the Weekend to the winning team and get them started on the journey to becoming entrepreneurs. My intention is to be able to do that here and also in Startup Reykjavik. I think we are starting to see the green shoots of yearly activities showing up in Iceland which goes back to the strategy of building a startup community here in Iceland. In my opinion, we are on Year II on the journey to building an Antifragile Startup Ecosystem here in Iceland.

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February 23, 2013

Startup Iceland 2013 – Platform to present your Startup

GreenQloud Booth – Career Day Reykjavik University

We had our planning meeting yesterday and Stefan suggested that we should have the startups from Iceland and around the world come and setup a booth during the Hackathon and UNConference event. We all thought that it would be a great idea so we are going to market and allow Startups from Iceland and all over to setup a booth space. This would be a perfect setting where more than 350 people who are interested in Startups, Entrepreneurship and Startup Communities will be present and a great audience to present one’s startup idea
pitch.

Remake Electric – UTMessan 2013

I have felt that it is a great way for people who are starting up to tell a story about their vision. The original idea was to give a 5 min slot to a handful of startups to present during the conference, which is too short a time and does not give enough depth to a startup and the audience will not have time to absorb why they should be interested in the company. So we are calling all startups to contact us by sending an email to booth at startupiceland dot com and reserve your space. This is a perfect opportunity to practice your pitch and who knows maybe you will find your angel investor. Let us know what you think of the idea as well.

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January 14, 2013

Organizing Angel Capital

As we are starting the preparation for Startup Iceland 2013 (have you signed up and marked your calendar yet?), one of the elements of building startup ecosystem is to bring more investors into venture investing group. I think there are many avenues for Entrepreneurs to get started like Startup Weekend, Startup Reykjavik, Innovit Incubator and the University Startup Weekend class etc in Iceland, however, there is not a lot of activities that are centered around investors. I have been searching for  model that we could adopt here in Iceland and I finally found someone who is doing this in Seattle – John Sechrest. You can read about John here.

Seattle Angel Conference

The biggest challenge in Angel and Venture Investing is not RISK, there I have said it it is not about Risk it is about not being able to devote enough time for the amount of capital that one invests. Just to give you an example, a typical angel investor may invest from $10000 to $100000 per company and in order to really spread the investments one needs to take 3 to 5 companies. Given with Angel investing one needs to spend 6+ hours a week for every company, investors need to spend considerable amount of time for a small size of the investment. In addition, one cannot make a living doing this, again there I have said it. If you think you are going to make a living doing Angel Investing or Venture Investing, the truth hits you quite harshly across the face when you are starting out. The pay window if you are successful in Angel Investing or Venture Investing is nothing less than 5 years, you could get lucky but that is kind of the average and the returns are lumpy ie you don’t get a steady stream of returns but one or two lumpy payments if the companies you invest in gets an exit. So, why would someone go through all this pain to make a living… well, the same reason why an Entrepreneur goes through all the pain to start a company and build things of value. There is a reason it is called Angel Capital :)

Back to practical matters, John shared with me a template for a conference that he has organized in Seattle, called the Seattle Angel Conference. I think it is a sensible model that could work to bring new investor groups into the world of Angel investing and Venture investing. For everything we need a few good women and men, and John has assembled that group in Seattle. I have invited him to come and share his experience in Startup Iceland. The gist of Angel Conference is pretty simple:

  1. A group of Angel’s come together form a Limited Liability Company (LLC or ehf in Iceland)
  2. Each of the members commit capital ie $5000 each
  3. LLC Manager is elected
  4. 6 to 10 weeks of due diligence is conducted by the group that came together
  5. 5 to 10 companies are picked to pitch during the conference
  6. A subset of the companies are funded by the LLC and all members can participate as mentors or advisors to the companies that were picked

This is an incredible value for Angel investors, a seasoned group can guide new Angel investors into the world of venture investing. This model is very similar to the Mentorship driven accelerators that have become so successful. Of all the things that have been said and done, everyone can learn when we collaborate and work together. I am big believe that bringing diverse group of people together and throwing a challenge to them and providing the right incentive can facilitate solution to any problem. I think Iceland needs a better class of Investors, other than the posers! we need someone really committed to building the startup ecosystem. koma svo!
 

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October 19, 2012

3 Ideas for a better Iceland

Original post was written for the Asbru Blog.

Idea #1: Invest in yourself and your local community

Source: Inspiration Monkey

I believe every Icelander can invest in their local community and in local entrepreneurs and in themselves. It takes very little to create an impact in a small community. I believe if 20 people get-together with ISK 2.000.000 each and invest in 5 entrepreneurial companies it can transform not only the entrepreneur but the investor as well. Investing is a lot of work, but that is the only way to grow value and wealth. I am not talking about investing in the Stock Market or Buying Government Bonds, which are perfectly acceptable methods to invest, but picking smaller companies and entrepreneurs in areas that each and everyone of us is familiar in and investing in them will transform Iceland. My partners and I did just that when we invested in Clara (http://clarahq.com), when I met with the founders they had a good idea and they were going places but lacked the mentoring and money to take their ideas to market. The business was in a field that I was very comfortable in (software, internet and computer systems), we decided to invest in the company. Today Clara is a 14 member team serving Gaming companies like Sony Online, CCP and many other companies. We achieved the team growth and value growth in about 2 years and my belief is that we could have done it faster if we had invested more money, the biggest challenge we faced was the lack of faith of Icelander in their own abilities and ideas. I think changing that would go a long way. I am not talking about some esoteric ideas, the concept of Angel Investor Networks and Angel Investing is starting to make a real impact all around the world.

Idea #2: Volunteer to be a mentor, helper or give something without expecting anything back
If you don’t have the capital to be an angel investor, you can volunteer to be a mentor or give something to the community to enable knowledge sharing or network sharing. I am not talking about charity, though charity and social work have a place in a society. I mean time and effort where you contribute something without expecting anything back. A mentor is that kind of a person, without spewing ideas but listening to a young entrepreneur or practitioner in your field of expertise. There are many avenues to do that Asbru Incubator, Klak, Innovit and more recently Startup Reykjavik provide the platform for everyone to participate and contribute to building a sustainable startup ecosystem.

Idea #3: Learn a new skill using a new technology
This idea comes back to the first idea, of investing in ourselves. Learning a new skill using the current or new technologies. The world of technology changes rapidly and there could be a point in time where everyone of us can be left behind if we don’t keep up. I would encourage everyone to take an hour a day to pick up one skill, whether it is blogging, tweeting or coding in HTML or reading about technology or learning how technology works. This is important not just for those in the technology field but for everyone. To quote my favorite mentor Brad Feld, “The machines have taken over, now they are patiently waiting to learn everything about us by asking us to input everything about ourselves into them”, don’t you think it is time we should learn how the machines work? not because any sinister agenda but just to be curious and asking questions.

My dream is that in 10 years we have a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem in Iceland that provides sufficient resources for anyone to start fresh, create value and make a living. I think Entrepreneurship is life, one of my favorite blogs is written by Jerry Colona, I could not have said this better so I am quoting Jerry:

“Those who seek to create their own startup do so more often out of the desires for freedom, dignity, validation and, ultimately, self-actualization (in the full Maslow-vian sense) than for riches. (Indeed, those who seek riches most often fail.) For them, and despite what most politicians and government officials blather on about, it’s not about jobs. It’s about life.”

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August 13, 2012

Startup Reykjavik – Investor Day

Today we have a guest post by Kristján Kristjánsson, one of the organizers of Startup Reykjavik and CEO of Innovit. I am going to the Investor day in Startup Reykjavik, if you know of an Angel investor in the Icelandic investor community, they should participate in the Investor Day or if you have been thinking about becoming an angel investor here is your chance to get into the deal flow, you should get a chance to meet with other angel and venture investors to build your network and start investing in your community.

StartupReykjavik Investment day – August 17th, go? #Friday

StartupReykjavik is Icelands first and only accelerator program. Ten teams were picked out of 200 applicants, given 16k, housing and mentorship to go as far as they could with their businesses in ten weeks. Every day they have showed up for work to listen to roughly 50 mentors giving advice in business models, networking and pitching, with hope to get their business going to create value.

Next friday (August 17th, 2012), all these teams will pitch in front of an audience of investors seven minutes each, hoping to find the right investor, explaining why that would make sense and showing of their final products that they have worked on during the period.

There are two ways to attend the event.

1. Reception at Arion-Bank headquarters, Borgartún 5, 101 Reykjavík
2. Online live stream from the event.

If you are an investor and would like to attend or view online streaming, don’t hesitate to ask for an invite and we will send you the invitation and live stream link.

Other reasons you should attend?
1. Are you a runner? Icelands biggest Marathon is on Saturday, August 18th. Sign up here
2. Do you like culture? Culture night 2012 is the country’s largest one-day culture event, with thousands activities for tourists and locals alike ending with big fireworks on midnight.
3. The country has some of the most amazing landscapes known to man. If you like the pure atmosphere, in your in for a treat. (video made by one of the participants http://vimeo.com/44193401)

The teams:

When Gone
First and foremost. WhenGone services people who face premature death, people that are losing their health and people that face risks in everyday life. Through when gone, everyone can leave their loved ones their greatest stories, memories and words in person. Thus allowing people of all ages, races and economic level to leave their legacy for generations to come.

StartupVille
Startupville is a place for investors and start-ups to play the investing game. A social game where investors make virtual investments in real start-ups for virtual equity and in the process they interact, get to know each other better and have fun. It’s also about the investor – startup relationship transcending to a real one where an investor gets to be proactive in the progress of a startup

MyMxLog
Mymxlog is a professional online software service for airline, operators and technicians. They enable management of licences, certificates, training and experience necessary to maintain aircraft in accordance with european regulations.

CloudEngineering
Cloud Engineering is a developing advanced techniques to extract data from a wide range of web-pages and other data sources quickly, reliably and robustly, without requiring any specialised knowledge of programming concepts, HTML structure, or regular expressions. And all within your browser ö no installs required. Our customers will be able to extract online market intelligence which will give them a competitive edge in an ever more competitive world.

Designing Reality
A solution based company specialising in Imaging technology and custom solutions. Offering highly accurate and realistic looking three-dimensional models from photographs.

Live Shuttle
Live-Shuttle is a service for smart phone users to share their experience live. The service allows the user share live footage from his travels around the world and friends and family to stay updated on his current location. Upon returning from a trip the user has a photo or video map of his travels. All incoming media is geo-tagged and sorted to provide the world with live footage from every possible location simultaneously which allows Live Shuttle to broadcast live from interesting events like Music Festivals, Natural Disasters or protests to name a few.

RemindMe
RemindMe is an automatic medical dispenser. For medication to be effective people have to take them according to their doctors advice. Unfortunately only 50% of people take their medicine correctly. Remind me intends to increase medical compliance and people’s quality of life by using a new reminding service for the elderly and forgetful.

GuitarParty.com
Provide high quality lyrics, lessons and guitar tabs to users. One stop shop for lyrics, chords and lessons.

Heilsufar
No one is more aware of his health than the individual himself. People should therefore have the opportunity to access their own health related data and be able to make informed decisions regarding those matters. Heilsufar.is will be the portal where you can request your data to be sent to, where you can add your own information and analyse and compare your health situation to others. Heilsufar is about modernising the area of personal healthcare information

Stream Tags
Stream Tags make more value out of the movie experience by giving viewers the opportunity to tag movies and provide information and buying opportunities relevant for the viewer.

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August 12, 2012

2 ways to get an Investor Meeting

Jan Schultink is in Iceland on holiday, he contacted me a couple of months back and asked if he could spend some time with the Startup Reykjavik Teams to mentor them for their presentation for the upcoming Demo Day. I obviously said YES! and connected him to Kristjan. For those of you who don’t know the first batch of Startup Reykjavik will present to a invited list of investors on Demo Day on August 17th. Jan has blogged about it here. I wrote about pitching to an investor. Jan used to work for McKinsey, a strategy consulting firm and I have been very impressed with the firm and the work they do.

Idea Transplant: The Art of Pitching VCs

The fact that he wants to teach us some of the tricks of the trade is huge and I am taking advantage of that. I am planning to be there. Startup Reykjavik organizing team has made it into an open presentation, so if you have an hour and want to participate show up at  Armuli 13 around 11:00. I think we will learn something. I truly believe one has to take time to build beautiful presentations but it is a balance. I have seen enough pitches to know which ones stick and which don’t. The usual format of a demo day is 6 to 7 minutes for a startup to pitch their idea, product and traction. Although it seems like 6 to 7 minutes is not a lot a time, believe me it is more than enough to get an investor to want to meet with you. I have been telling every entrepreneur who would listen that the key to the pitches is to get a follow up meeting. Investment decisions especially in a startup is a lengthy process, you as the entrepreneur need to make sure that you are providing all the decision point data to the investor so the cycle gets shorter. Having someone like Jan help you get that message and content organized properly is extremely important. Check out some of the presentations that he has prepared. They are impressive.

Idea Transplant: Six minute startup pitch

Oh, I forgot to mention what the 2 ways to get an investor meeting… if you have figured it out by now then you get 10 points! otherwise read on:

  1. Presentation has to be beautiful and professional ~ Memorable
  2. Pitch the problem, sell the problem and leave the audience with a bit of your solution and why they need to talk to you more ~ Make them want more

There are obviously many micro strategies to implement the above two big ideas, I am hoping to learn a lot listening to Jan tomorrow.

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July 18, 2012

Angel and Seed Investor Awards – Guest Post

This is the first post of the “Welcome to Post on Wednesdays!” blog post in Startup Iceland. This post is a follow up post by Ashwin Bhambri and I think he has a point on trying to bring awareness, attention and glamour to the early stage investors. I am seriously thinking of including an award show as part of Startup Iceland 2013… what do you all think?

Image source: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Isn’t Angel Investing underrated or more so undervalued? The impact it can have on the global economy today is under estimated, as almost every third startup or small business requires to raise pre-revenue finance that banks or other organized institutions would typically not fund. Seed / angel investing is the only alternative left to the entrepreneur.

Angel investing is underrated simply because as a concept it is underutilized. There are just not enough proactive angel investors or money in angel / seed asset class for this activity to be considered mainstream or a serious factor in the building of economies.

Nevertheless, the potential of angel / seed financing and the overall impact it can create is colossal. If Peter Thiel had not to take a chance on Facebook it may not be the Facebook we all know today. Time and time again, those investors who took a leap of faith and invested in Angel rounds dramatically changed the course of history for many rockstar companies today starting from Google to Facebook to Twitter.

To be fair, Investing is also about capitalism and the simple theory if one does not see a return one will not invest applies. Arriving at an ROI from a pre-revenue start-up is not exactly pragmatic and an angel investor takes a huge risk here – What makes them invest is

a. They like the startup team, want to help and give back in the process
b. Their gut feel prevails over logic and tells them to go with a start-up.

Investors who repeatedly make angel / seed investments build the startup ecosystem and should be honoured with recognition and accolades for their contribution. There should be an attempt to glamorize angel investing and this could be the rocket fuel that catalysts more investors to join the angel bandwagon and can lead to more investment activity.

How do we do this?  For starters there can be the Grammy and/or Oscar equivalent for investors or the Angel & Seed Investor Awards where active investors making investments are nominated and awarded,  as investors are the early heroes of any startup ecosystem.
Glamour is also an amazing communication medium to a large audience and could convert traditional investors who typically invest in established listed companies to become angel investors.

Iceland could be the world’s accelerator of this initiative as the time & environment is optimum. Thus far I have not come across any Investor Awards event that is mainstream and it’s about time someone takes the initiative and makes it happen. If it fails it fails, if it succeeds it could do for the rise of angel investing what y-Combinator did for the rise of startup accelerators and that’s definitely a risk worth taking

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July 16, 2012

Excuse department is closed

As I have mentioned before, guest posts are welcome on the Startup Iceland Blog. We did our first post about a week back. I plan to create a calendar of posts. Every wednesday we will have a guest post, those wednesdays we don’t have a post I will fill the gap. I have been slacking on the blog because of various reasons but as I tell everyone the “Excuse Department is Closed!“, starting this monday we will have a blog post everyday. The title for the blog post is stolen from Mark Suster, he was referring to the sales teams trying to find excuses for not selling products. Anyways, I digress… the blog is going to get back on track. This coming wednesday we have another blog post by Ashwin, who wrote the first blog post. The topic for wednesday is about Angel Investors and how that cohort can dramatically change the landscape of Startups and Entrepreneurship. I attended the open pitch session last thursday in Startup Reykjavik, all the teams are improving dramatically in their elevator pitches, however we need to hit this one out of the park. IMHO, getting the local angel network to participate and invest in the group is the key. I will be working diligently to get everyone who is interested to participate in the demo day.

While I write this blog post my brain keeps coming back to the saying Excuse department is closed. I have been thinking about Annie Thorisdottir, the 2012 Crossfit World Champion from Iceland. She is a huge role model for Iceland and what can be achieved if one is disciplined and trains with a goal in mind. I have not met her or know her but she has put Iceland back on the map for the right reasons. Imagine the odds, the same ones that gets thrown at me when ever I bring the notion that world class startups can be built from Iceland. She was a nobody before last years event, and she was only 22 years old… impressive to be a world champion at that age. I am wondering what excuses she gave herself for training so hard.

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