Welcome to the introductory episode of our series! Our goal is to give you all the knowledge and skills you’ll need to raise angel investment. In this episode, we’ll go over the structure and content of the series.
The real magic happens with experience. Go and get some.
Course overview:
Raising Angel Investment in NZ is a series by experienced angel investor Dave Moskovitz, aimed at startup founders seeking angel investment
Format: Available as videos, podcasts, transcripts, or summaries, with short, focused episodes and homework assignments
There are six sections covering:
- Introduction, and whether angel investment is right for you
- Foundercraft: your toolkit for becoming a great founder
- Investment basics: terminology, investor types, and choosing investors
- Deep dive into angel mechanics: finding angels, how they think, preparing for a pitch, due diligence, valuation, and maintaining founder control
- Pitching: slide-by-slide pitch deck guidance plus “backpocket” material for tough questions
- Wrap-up and final advice
There is optional homework, and one assessment: whether or not your raise is successful!
Transcript:
Episode 1 – Introduction
Kia ora koutou, hello and welcome to the first episode of nzangels.com – a guide to raising angel investment in Aotearoa New Zealand. I’m Dave Moskovitz, one of New Zealand’s most experienced angel investors.
This site is for startup founders, and is all about how to raise angel investment for your startup. I’ve designed this site so that you can consume this information in the way that best suits you – as a series of short form videos, as a podcast, as written text in the form of transcripts, or as summaries. I recommend that you use it as a course and consume the episodes in sequence one at a time, but you can also dip in and out to the topics that interest you the most.
If you’re using it as a course, let me tell you right now that I’m going to assign you homework. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from many years in education technology, the real magic happens with experience – when you have to go out and apply your newly acquired knowledge to a real world problem. If you’re looking to raise investment for your venture, this is the main problem that you’re trying to solve, and you’ve come to the right place for help and advice based on decades of experience. Work through the homework to whatever degree you’re comfortable. But remember, as we say in the IT industry, garbage in, garbage out. If you want quality results, you’ll need to put the work into your pitch, and everything that goes into making an investable business that’s attractive to investors.
I’ll give you your first homework assignment right now – go to nzangels.com, our home site, and subscribe to updates to the site. You’ll get notified whenever we put out a new episode.
Oh crap, you’re thinking, if there’s homework, are there going to be assessments too? Let me give you some good news and some bad news. They’re both the same news item: there’s only one assessment, and that’s the presentation of your pitch to angel investors. Your score on that assessment is how much capital you raise for your company. It’s that simple. Noone really cares about any other metric from how well you follow the advice from this site. So if you want to successfully raise, listen up.
The series is divided into six sections, with each section containing a number of episodes. You’re a busy founder, so each episode is short, no longer than 10 minutes, and focuses fairly narrowly on one easily consumable topic. You can do this at your desk, while you’re commuting, when you’re washing the dishes, or when you can’t sleep at 2am.
You’re in the first section right now, the introduction – we’re covering basic info about the series, including whether or not angel investment is for you – after all, you don’t want to waste any time listening to me if you’re not going to raise; then there’s a short episode about me so you have some context about my story and experience, and an episode about definitions, because angel investors like jargon just like most other folks. I’m hoping to demystify the terminology so that you won’t find it intimidating.
The second section covers what I call foundercraft – the art and science of being a startup founder. You ask yourself, why is this important to investors? The answer is that the primary thing that early stage investors invest in is not a product, or even a business, but the founders. Angel-stage companies tend to pivot quite a lot in their early days, and the quality of founder is critical. I’m going to ask you to plumb the depths of your soul to try to figure out why in the blazes you’d be so masochistic as to want to found a startup. What are your motivations, and what are you trying to achieve? What kind of people will you need around you? What are the legal implications? The role of timing and luck? And critically, do you really need investment to do this?
The third section concerns investment basics, including more terminology, types of investors, types of investment, the investment ecosystem, mechanics of investment, and critically, how to chose your investors.
The fourth section is a deep dive into angel investment, and forms the core of the series. What are the different kinds of angel investors? Where would you find them? How do angels think? How does an angel investment round actually work, and how do you keep control over your destiny as a founder? What to expect from due diligence, legal documents, how to make your round easy to close, and the critical question of valuation, or how much your company is worth. We’ll also cover what angels look for in founders, how to make investors happy, and how to piss them off.
In the fifth section, we’ll talk about pitching, and how to make the best possible pitch to angels. We’ll go through a typical pitch deck slide by slide, and talk about what should go on each one. As well as the secret level of pitch decks, what we call backpocket material so that you’re ready for any tricky questions investors might throw at you.
And in the sixth section, we’ll wrap up with a review of key points, and some final advice for how to do a successful raise.
We’ll also include plenty of additional material, with links to other sources of information about raising, and interviews with New Zealand based angel investors and founders, so you can get a variety of perspectives on things.
At the end of this series, you’ll know what you need to do to raise, and the rest will be up to you. Your final assessment is your raise.
So there you have it, the birds-eye view of this series. Your homework now is to go to the nzangels.com web site and subscribe to updates from the site. This is a dead easy assignment, and will take you 30 seconds to complete.
The pithy quote I’d like you to remember from this episode is: The real magic happens with experience. Go get some.
Our next episode is All About You – Is angel investment really right for you and your venture? If not, let’s not waste your time chasing an impossible dream. If it is right for you, and you have what it takes, let’s roll up our sleeves and start preparing ourselves for what will be an epic journey.
I’ll be interested in your feedback, so if you have any questions or would just like to opine, please use the feedback form on the nzangels.com web site.
That’s all for now. Until next time, ka kite!
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