Angels on the East Coast

Hey Startups!

I attended the Halifax Angel Summit in Halifax last week. Sun Startup Essentials sponsored the event, and I gained a tremendous amount of data, and understanding on what Angel investors are looking for, when they look at you, the startups.

The morning started off with Dan MacDonald, President and CEO of inNOVAcorp. In a powerful and informative keynote, Dan shared his insights on Vetting the The Early Stage Investment Opportunity – READ: How they decide if they are going to give you money!!
Get your pencils poised because below are my Top points that you need to know!

Shelf Life of Financial Guidance is now measured in Minutes: be careful what you listen to and take as gospel

Angels are worried about cash burn and run rate more than ever

New opportunities will be vetted more robustly than ever before

There is a 4-Point Criteria

a. People
Do you have relevant experience?
Do you have the ENERGY that it is going to take?
How collaborative are you?
Integrity?
b. Market
Is the opportunity in a growing market or category?
Addressable Market: 100’s of Millions of Dollars. Yes!
c. Barrier
What is the barrier for competitors?
More than Patents!! What is the recipe of Goodness: Expertise, contacts, and unfair advantage in some wayFundability

You should be able to have a conversation about the above things on a napkin, or a whiteboard.

They are NOT interested in your Consultant-Written, hundreds of pages business plan.

Not about removing every risk: Vetting is defending your thinking. What have you done to VALIDATE your thinking?

What is the most likely business model that would allow this to reach the market?

Yes, they do revenue projections, and they want to understand this from YOU. They want to know 18 months. Leave your 5 year projections at home.

How is it done at inNOVAcorp?
Engage the opportunity (See point 4)
Work with opportunity for several months in an engaged process
Shop your idea to “Retired CEO types”
i. What are your validated, professional set of financials? Yes, they will Check, Check, Check again.

Want to see this in Full? Check out this speech, and others outlined below, at http://www.goldencoast.ca/2008/nao/
Other Sessions at the National Angel Summit Included:

Building a board for early-stage companies
(David Berkus, Keynote Speaker): A good board needs balance, not your best friends. Decide what you want out of your board: Advisors, or Governance. Remember that your board can have control at both a high level, influencing the shape and direction of the business, and the lowest level, controlling your hiring and firing.

Want to go International? Think about the UK; the Enterprise Investment Scheme is a pretty neat Tax program.
(Permjot Valia, keynote Speaker): The UK’s tax relief for income, capital gains, inheritance and investment losses go a long way to ensuring a vibrant and entrepreneurial economy, resilient to economic challenges and well-supplied with the risk capital it needs to grow.

Engineering killer exits
A great panel describes the best ways to Get Out (because you all have begun with the end in mind, haven’t you?)
Marnie Walker, Maple Leaf Angels tells us: If you can, sell your company when you don’t have to. You have time to know your buyers, evaluate terms, and protect your people and business. Austin Hill, co-founder of Radialpoint tells us to realize that investors are interested in what is best for their portfolios, not what is best for your company. Good news is, sometimes you can wait it out, take your learnings, and get back on track. Want to do it right from the start? Good IP, Great teams, Local to the market, you fit a product strategy gap of a bigger company, have a way to get market share, and well, have Revenue Potential.

Till next time!!

Sandra

Wow-ing in Waterloo

What an absolutely awesome event. We had 19 start-ups introduce themselves at the start of the event in a round the room intro (I wish I'd taken a photo of our whiteboard with everyone's names). Over 85% of the audience were first time Camp attendees so they had no idea what the un-conference was all about. And, our youngest entrepreneur yet, Grade 11 student Brandon Ces, owner of CES Landscaping. What fun!

Given we had a great audience (see my last post), David Crow did a great job of telling folks how things work and Jim Parsons suggested we do the round the room introductions after which things sky-rocketed with buzz, networking, questions, presentations, and general good times.
Jesse, my co-instigator, wrote a post of the event including some great photo's, especially his last one with two entrepreneurs talking over an OLPC laptop.

Here are some of the start-ups that presented:* Village Toolbox * Wimax solution from Khosrow Modarressi of UoW* FightTube.tv * Student from the Velocity residence at UoW presenting 3 ideas for mobile apps - can you post your name please :)* for the other 2 folks, please LMK who you are and I'll edit this post with your startups!

Dan Debow talked about his experience growing WorkBrain and his current start-up Rypple.com. He got lots of tough audience questions, including how you know when to stop trying - what a great question. Dan had told a great story about one of the first start-ups he tried to launch in the music space, think last.fm. He met much great resistance and so switched his focus back to Workbrain, to help them grow to 230 or so million in annual revenues. If you haven't tried Rypple.com yet, I highly recommend the service and have been contemplating using it to find out more about what you all thought about the event. Assuming I get the time to do that this week, I'll post some of the results :)

We announced our new server give away from the Sun Microsystems Start-up Essentials program and had 29 folks provide cards to register for the contest. We'll write more about this shortly. The 30 second view is we'll be doing a draw just before Christmas to give away a Sun Server to those that register at one of our events. So watch out for where we'll be going next :)

Ciao for Now!
Mic and Sandra

Cybera Summit '08 in Banff

Any innovator got inspired after attending Cybera event that took place at the picturesque Fall setting in Banff, Canada. The summit gathered Alberta's researchers across national institutions, startups, and entrepreneurs to discuss innovation, trends, challenges, and the future of the Cloud Computing. Among topics we've covered were Grid, Cloud, Open Social and Social Networking, scientific computing and its evolution, how today's technology help us to be more productive, be more social, and nevertheless be aware of the privacy and other risks that are still being addressed as we speak. We had an interesting panel, that I was part of, discussing trends of Cloud Computing, whether it's relevant to us and how startups, end users, corporations and researches view and participate in the trend. A few times, the discussion turned into an open forum with the audience expressing their opinion and impact of modern technology on society as well as the role of the government, particularly in Canada. Interestingly, in Canada, unlike in the US, government plays a significant role in connecting with startups, helping with funding, and jointly working on innovation. I think it is a great way to boost the technology advancement in the local community.