NZ Angels that were at last year’s NZ Angel Association Summit will remember Jordan Green, deputy chairman of the Australian Association of Angel Investors. Jordan recently appeared on the Frank Peters Show, a weekly-ish podcast with the strapline “Startup Stories in Angel Investment and Venture Capital”.
It’s interesting to listen to an American angel interviewing an Australian angel and triangulating our position here in New Zealand. Jordan puts in a plug for this yesr’s New Zealand Angel Summit. He also talks up New Zealand’s SCIF. It’s nice to get some external validation and buzz about what’s happening here.
Jordan also talks about
syndication in Australia and its development
problems in the Australian VC space
strategic exits
the importance of appearing to be a local company in the country in which you’re operating
Basho Technologies, a Massachusetts-based startup offering software to improve sales performance, has had an interesting ride obtaining funding from investors. The Wall Street Journal reports that after a year of trying to secure funding with VC’s, they gave up and were pleasantly surprised by the difference in attitude and approach of angels. They found that angels were much more engaged in meetings, and offered much greater diversity.
According to a University of New Hampshire study, “the number of [US] venture capital deals fell 10% to 2,550 in 2008, according to VentureSource, the number of angel investments dropped only 2.9% to 55,480 deals.”
Two studies from North Carolina State University show that project managers can get much better performance from their team when they treat team members with honesty kindness and respect, and that product development teams can reap significant quality and cost benefits from socializing with people who work for their suppliers.
In other words, “nice guys finish first”.
Dr Jon Bohlmann, the author of the first study says his results show that if a team’s leader was perceived as “basically being a nice guy,” then “team members showed a significant increase in commitment to the team’s success and to the project they were working on.”
The second study, led by Dr Rob Handfield, showed that significant cost and quality benefits can result from informal socializing between employees of a product-development company and those companies that supply the product developers with material and labor.
It does sound like common sense, but it’s nice to know that good business behaviour has tangible returns.
“My experience is you need to raise between $500K and a $1M to do almost anything.”
“If you aren’t ready to sell equity in your idea [at a valuation that will be interesting to an Angel], finance it yourself.”
“Almost without exception, I don’t want to own your dream, I want to make money and have a little fun along the way. If you never sell the company, I never realize a gain.”