Angel Investing

Many times when I am listening to a pitch for a new Internet or Social Media company, the entrepreneur attempts to categorize their company as another YouTube or Facebook. Now it is entirely possible that this may be true, but it is highly unlikely. More importantly, using companies like YouTube or Facebook create an impression of the type of story we should be listening to hear.

Many times when I am listening to a pitch for a new Internet or Social Media company, the entrepreneur attempts to categorize their company as another YouTube or Facebook. Now it is entirely possible that this may be true, but it is highly unlikely. More importantly, using companies like YouTube or Facebook create an impression of the type of story we should be listening to hear.

I am constantly surprised when I see an Entrepreneur presenting to a group of investors and they make a real minor league mistake. The one I encountered recently was a company who passed out a Fact Sheet and in the Pro Forma Financial Projections indicated that the financials were available via an NDA.

Recently, Mark Suster, General Partner @ GRP Partners Venture Capital firm, took over as the host of This Week in Venture Capital a weekly Internet TV show/podcast. The link takes you to a recent show with Jim Armstrong a managing director of Clearstone Ventures.

I just posted this on SoCal Buzz but realize this has much wider implications than just Southern California. So, I decided to re-post it here.

Senator Dodd's Financial Reform Bill is working its way through the Senate. Now I don't know many people who do not agree that we need some controls in place to ensure that the banking industry doesn't do the more of the same that helped created the crisis in 2008. Or that we really can't allow a business segment to be so big that failure is no longer an option and massive amounts of bail out money is required to stop a global financial crisis.

This is one question that I have gotten quite a bit by entrepreneurs who are currently pitching or thinking about pitching their companies. There is a lot of rhetoric out there, so I decided to see if I could find some information on my own.

I first ran into the folks at ZZYZX SnapJacks when they screened at Keiretsu the week before last. Usually companies that are trying to present are pretty early stage, have a concept or maybe a prototype product. These folks have the product. In fact, they have a pretty good inventory of their products and have been actively selling for some time.