Entries Tagged 'news' ↓

The Angel Association AGM has been shifted in time and place on Wednesday 18 November at Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, 88 Shortland Street, Auckland.  The agenda has expanded significantly as well, including consideration of applying to the Charities Commission for charitable status.

Download the agenda.

The New Zealand Venture Investment Fund is committing $4 million to an investment partnership with Trans Tasman Commercialisation Fund to invest into new technologies emerging out of Auckland University.

NZVIF’s $4 million commitment will be alongside the Trans Tasman Commercialisation Fund – an AU$30 million investment fund established last year to commercialise research at Auckland University and four Australian universities.

The investment partnership will look at commercial opportunities emerging from UniServices – Auckland University’s commercialisation agency. NZVIF and TTCF have already invested into two drug development companies spun out of UniServices – Pathway Therapeutics and Saratan Therapeutics.

NZVIF chief executive Franceska Banga said the partnership is encouraging given the level of innovation emerging from Auckland University.

“Auckland University is New Zealand’s highest ranked research university, and UniServices is generating some exciting commercial opportunities, as we are already seeing with Pathway and Saratan.

“NZVIF’s involvement in the trans-Tasman partnership ensures that there will be a New Zealand focus to companies being developed from New Zealand generated research.

TTCF Investment Manager Craig Reilly said there are significant investment opportunities in New Zealand-generated life sciences, engineering and ICT research.

“With this partnership, we hope to see greater investment in research which has the potential to advance to the commercial stage in global markets.”

NZVIF’s partnership with TTCF is through NZVIF’s Seed Co-Investment Fund. Through the fund, NZVIF is investing $40 million into early stage companies with strong potential for high growth, alongside investments made by its partners.

This is the eleventh partnership NZVIF has entered into through the Seed Co-Investment Fund. Through these partnerships, NZVIF and angel groups have co-invested over $33 million into 30 companies.

WebFund has invested in a new start-up, MusicHype, a music industry platform provider which will enable well-known bands and their fans to form valuable relationships.

The MusicHype team includes WebFund Directors Dave Moskovitz and Stefan Korn, Managing Director James O’Hare, Digital Strategist Annabel Youens, CTO Jeff Mitchell, and Hypemaster Adam Bryce.

Move over China, the future of manufacturing is alive in a five-person shop in Wellington, New Zealand.  Think cheap, quick, green, and global. And everything’s made to order.

That’s the headline on the latest issue of Inc. Magazine, with Ponoko’s David ten Have on the cover.

This is a scene in every angel’s dream, where their investment’s CEO literally becomes a poster boy.  David and the team totally deserve it too, as they’ve worked both hard and smart to make a market and change the game of manufacturing.

Good onya guys, New Zealand’s angel investors and entrepreneurs are right behind you, and would love to see your innovation and success replicated a thousand times over.

Update: Read the Inc. article online

Disclosure: my trust owns shares in Ponoko.

Do you want to be a startup CEO? Do you have what it takes to be a CEO?  WebFund has a number of great business concepts looking for the right person to drive them forward.  We’re also building a database of people capable of driving success in an online business. If you’re interested in joining a team of highly motivated, agile, quick, smart people, just contact us!

More quotable quotes from this year’s Morgo

Mike Hutchinson – ICE Interactive (Quoting a Tongan cleaner):

Everyone needs:

• Something to do
• Someone to love
• Something to look forward to

Leigh Jasper and Rob Phillpot – Aconex

• Get the right people, and move the wrong ones on quickly
• Defend the culture
• Be born global
• Know your industry
• You can’t skimp on service
• Maintain your independence and level the playing field
• Strategise the network
• Align participants’ incentives through the business model

Mark Stuart (WaikatoLink) and Brad Duft (CoDa Theraputics)

• Fundraising reality: No IP, no money
• Deal-making reality: No IP, no deal
• Innovation = invention + commercialisation;

Andy Lark (Dell)

• A CEO dedicates on average 9 minutes to each decision
• The quality of your [social] network is a predictor of your success. You are your network.
• It’s not how many awards you get, it’s how many recommenders you have.
• Authenticity matters

Ten tips:

• Communicate abnormally to be noticed
• Timing is everything
• Turn up – there’s no substitute for being there in person
• Plan the pass on – if you’re asking for a reference, write that reference
• Avoid communication constipation
• Cold calling rarely works
• Nurture your network; don’t be needy
• Respect rejection
• Work your story

Morgo is Jenny Morel’s summit for people involved in NZ’s high-growth businesses.  You’d be hard pressed to find a conference room in New Zealand with more entrepreneurial energy and smarts.  Nearly all of the speakers are inspirational, and the quality and level of conversation is extremely high.

Unfortunately, Chatham House Rules apply, but here are some of the best generic quotes of the day:

Ross Stevens – Victoria Design School:

The future is remarkable but the present is stranger than we believe

A lot of futures projects have a very large bullshit factor

Mark Billinghurst – Hitlab NZ

(Quoting Bill Buxton) It takes 20 years for new technologies to go from the lab to the living room

The future is with us.  The trick is to spot it – commercialisation is more about prospecting than alchemy.

Selwyn Pellett – Endace / Imarda

Knowing where you’re going saves everything: time, energy, money, reputation, marriages

I don’t care about where our products are manufactured, or even designed. What I do care about is where we pay tax – we need to ensure our tax base stays healthy in New Zealand, otherwise it will place a disproportionate load on the rest of us.

Recurring revenue is very addictive!

Bill Reichert – Garage Technology Ventures

New companies need to be global on day one.

The biggest value adds in startups come from stealing other people’s technologies and integrating them in a novel way that is hard to replicate.

This week’s launch of AngelLink could mark a pivotal moment in the development of New Zealand’s innovation space.

Conceived and managed by WaikatoLink, AngelLink is a new national angel investment network specifically designed to commercialise intellectual property from universities and CRI’s, and is backed by the country’s most experienced and well-resourced hi-tech and biotech investors.

It brings New Zealand angel investment to the next level.

This is exciting news for a number of reasons:

• Movac, K1W1, Sparkbox, Neville Jordan, Waikato University, AUT, and SCIF are coming together to actively collaborate. While these players have co-invested with each other on a tactical basis before, this is the first time they’ve all agreed to work together in a more formal, strategic framework.
• Research institutions generate considerable intellectual property that until now has never seen the light of day, due to limited resources and commercialisation experience in the niche investment spaces and geographic locations that they occupy. A national network will increase the likelihood of successful commercialisation of some of New Zealand’s best IP.
• Conversely, angel investors nationwide have had limited access to university-sourced IP. AngelLink will give access to opportunities to a wider group of experienced investors.

The common theme is that all of the stakeholders – inventors, entrepreneurs, incubators, investors, and government – all understand that there are huge gains to be realised by working together, and have the appetite to make it happen. People realise that the pie can be made disproportionately bigger by relinquishing some ownership and control.

There’s a word for that – maturity.

And the experience and professionalism is evident from the start. AngelLink achieved SCIF accreditation prior to launch. Although based in the Waikato, they chose to launch at NZX in Wellington to underscore the national nature of the network. AngelLink is not a small club of wealthy dentists and farmers. At the launch, Chris de Boer, AngelLink’s chairman, said that he’d never seen such a broad spectrum of New Zealand investors in one room, ever. The gathering included people like Wayne Mapp (Minister of Science Research and Technology), Mark Weldon (CEO NZX), Franceska Banga (CEO NZVIF), Sir John Anderson (Chancellor Waikato University), Jim Bolger (Chairman NZ Post), Neville Jordan (Endeavour Capital), Mark Stuart (CEO WaikatoLink), Greg Sitters (Sparkbox), Phil McCaw and David Beard (Movac), Suse Reynolds (Angel HQ), John Errington (CEO VicLink), as well as a number of familiar faces from the local Wellington angel scene. Exposure to the entire investment food chain is compelling.

Chris said that they already have pipeline with four deals ready to go on day one.

There is some potential risk in setting up a new national angel network that has some overlap with the existing regional clubs. Some of New Zealand’s fledgling angel clubs are struggling to achieve and maintain critical mass, both in terms of investment capacity and ability to attract quality opportunities. But that shouldn’t be a problem so long as AngelLink sticks to institutional IP, and doesn’t compete with clubs for deals coming from local incubators and garage entrepreneurs. Syndication is all about sharing expertise, resources, risk and reward in such a way that everyone benefits.

And if AngelLink continues in the same manner as it has started, everyone will benefit from commercialising previously hidden IP.

New Zealand will be the winner.

The latest Young Company Finance, the half-yearly publication describing the details of which deals have been done in the <$5m space, has just been released.

It has been an excellent start to the year for seed, startup and early expansion investment, with both numbers of investments (33) and amount invested ($30M) for the first six months of 2009 higher than for all of 2008.

Most of the activity was in Q2; in other words, we’re on a steep upwards trend:

NZTE Escalator were particularly active with seven investments, along with ICE Angels (5), Cure Kids Ventures (3), MOVAC (2), Pacific Channel (2), Powerhouse Ventures (2) and others taking lead roles.  It was especially interesting that 85% of the deals involved syndication partners, significantly higher than previous reporting periods.

Even more telling is that the number of deals where SCIF was the only co-investor has dropped from 12 in 2007 to 8 in 2008 to only 2 in the first half of 2009.

That’s excellent news for the industry.  Investment groups are taking risks together, and not relying on gummint.  NZTE Escalator is taking tiny bets on embryonic plays where even angels fear to tread.

We’re coming of age.

Download the report.

Bill Reichert (Garage Ventures) is visiting NZ and presented to a capacity crowd at Unlimited Potential’s Gadgets, Games and Geeks yesterday on The New Rules for Entrepreneurs and Investors.

His full presentation is worth reading, but here is the summary for the impatient:

1. Create value
2. Build a team
3. Develop a mantra
4. Get going
5. Learn to bootstrap
6. Go global day one
7. Be a fast adaptor
8. Make sure everyone sells
9. Be realistic about pace of adoption
10. People trump technology

HT: Marie-Claire