In the first part of last week I attended the first ever Southwest Regional Angle Summit organized by Bob Morrison, the Executive Director of the Desert Angels. The event brought together several local angel investors along with representation from the Desert Angels, New Mexico Angels, ATIF, Tech Coast Angels, and some VC funds.

Though this was a regional even, I dropped in from NYC, and Frank Peters of the Tech Coast Angels made the trip in from southern California. I think we were both quite impressed with what was going on!

Since this was the first year, Bob simply established a suggested agenda, and the conversation was pretty free form. We discussed everything from improving communication among angel networks for sharing deals to marketing angel groups online, and capitalizing on tech transfer opportunities.


Just like the regional meetings in the Northwest and the Northeast, groups want to share deals. When a deal gets going, and a group can’t get enough money to fill out the round, they want to bring in other investment groups. The conversation turned to due diligence standards and best practices, but everyone quickly realized that this would be tough to implement across groups. In the end everyone agreed that they’d probably have to do their own screening/due diligence on every deal anyway, regardless of whether or not the deal was referred from another group. Naturally Angelsoft was discussed by all, as we can easily provide the infrastructure for making syndication a reality!

Having Frank attend and represent an extremely established angel group was also appreciated by the local groups. It was a great opportunity for them to get an outside perspective, and to see they problems/issues they could be facing several years down the road.

Personally, I found the New Mexico stories of tech transfer to be interesting. Given their location, they see technologies coming from Los Alamos among other tech research centers, and they’ve been having meetings to match entrepreneurs with this ideas and launch companies. Haven’t heard too many other groups, so its definitely and approach to keep an eye on.

Overall a very successful meeting, and there was definitely interest in making it a full blown yearly event, potentially involving the ACA!

Evan Bartlett :: Mar.31.2008 :: Angel Group Manager, Angel Investor, Events ::