If you are a startup CEO, or work for a startup – these are challenging times. The world as you know it is on hiatus, and uncertainty reigns. I would like to share some wise advice from my friend and fellow board member at the Angel Capital Association, Pat LaPointe from Frontier Angels in Bozeman, […]
First of all, you shouldn’t create an exit strategy for an investor – it’s actually the first question you should answer for yourself if you’re thinking about a startup. You see, the exit strategy is about understanding who your customer is. Not the customer who buys your widget or app that you make, but the […]
Pitching your startup to angel and VC investors can seem like groundhog day – doing the same thing over and over and over. Let’s do the math. The average angel writes a $25,000 check. You have to pitch to at least ten or twenty investors before getting to a “yes”. The average startup raise is […]
Impact investing has always been focused on creating positive social and/or environmental outcomes. At some points, Impact Investing has struggled to define itself as compared with philanthropy. Both require measurable positive outcomes, and some philanthropies accomplish outcomes that startups cannot while some startups accomplish outcomes that philanthropies cannot. How are we to choose? One way […]
Measuring Impact has become a major challenge for impact investors. The main reason is that for all their good intents, organizations that develop impact metrics ultimately end up trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Impact metrics systems struggle to compare apples and oranges in order to demonstrate that the social and […]
All impact investing can be divided into primary or secondary impact and impact investors should understand the difference. We define “primary impact” as impact that is caused by the company carrying out its mission. Whenever a primary impact company sells its goods or services, there is social and/or environmental good that comes from it. Secondary […]
“New Space” is what we’re talking about. It’s not your granddaddy’s aerospace that was government controlled, cost billions of dollars and was top secret national imperative sort of stuff. Rockies Venture Club is pursuing its first Aerospace Investing program May 7th in hopes of raising our awareness of this booming “new” category of angel investing. […]
Convertible debt is commonly used in seed stage transactions, and for anything but friends and family, or a true 90 day or less bridge, I cannot understand why anyone would use these to fund a company, regardless of whether you’re an investor or founder – it’s equally bad for both. There are a lot of […]
In a panel on angel return data at the Angel Capital Association Summit recently the speaker went back and forth between data using ROI (multiples of the original investment) and IRR (internal rate of return). These metrics are very different and it is important for angels to have a good understanding of how using each […]
If you’ve read ANYTHING about cryptocurrencies and ICOs (Initial Coin/Token Offerings), you’ve read opinions from people who believe that the value of these coins will go up 100 times and others who believe that they will all crash to zero because there is “nothing there”. If you believe either of these groups, you’ll be in […]