But some companies, who I’ve learned is that if you keep your burn low and I think that this is a really important lesson not just about financing but just in general. Companies that have low burn rates by themselves hugely better probabilities are getting lucky over time. And so there have been...
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So my first question to you is what actually is an Angel Investor? Who wants to take that one? Mike Maples: Someone who loves to take a lot of risks. And it’s a individual hopefully aware of some industry expertise who invest $50k or $100k in raw start-ups. The term got derived in the 30's when ...
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We read the executive summaries. See if we like that. Then we have a phone conversation. And then we have a meeting. So the face-to-face meeting is getting more and more rare because the amount of deal flow is so high. I see five new deals a day. You can imagine I have to reject three a...
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So you don’t think that there's a right balance between deals and money? Mike Maples: Well I think that there's a risk that some companies get over funded. The venture firms have a lot of money right now. They've gone off to raise huge funds. I believe that too much money in a start-up is not on...
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So that’s a great segue in the next question which is what do you do for the company? If you end up investing in this new venture that this whole class, we'd all brought to you with this idea, what are you going to do for us? Mike Maples: Well, number one write a check which is crucial. ...
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So would you invest in someone who had a failure who comes back to you again? Ron Conway: Of course: Mike Maples: I had a recent forward fumble in that regard. So the first investment I ever made when I moved out here was in a company called Odeo which is a podcasting company started by Evan Wi...
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So the question is balancing the founding team versus the idea. How important is each? Ron Conway: In my mind 80% is the founder team, 20% is the idea. A good idea is really a pre-requisite today. So when I look at entrepreneur, when I see a company it’s the founders that I'm judging. Their pe...
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One of the things that keeps bubbling around in my brain as your talking is this incredibly rich ecosystem that we have here. Where we’ve got the successful entrepreneurs with the great track record. We've got the angel investors. We have the VCs. Of course we've got these talented students comin...
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So let’s imagine someone in this room is starting some new venture and their doing it in their dorm room. And they want to to get some angel funding, to get a little bit of escape velocity. How would they pick someone? How do you know someone's a good angel investor? What are the things I should...
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So let’s talk about the transition from angel investing to VC. Right, that's going to be an interesting transition point. I have a couple of questions related to this. One having to do with, do you have a situation where you get to the end and you think it's a go but you have difficult time gett...
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Let’s imagine that we all had one big huge hit on out venture that we came to you with. Then now we've got our pockets full of cash. And we've decided that we want to become angel investors. What would we do to become good angel investors? It certainly just doesn't require the ability to write a ...
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