Trust is everything in the world of angel investing. Better Member Profiles, visible to other group members, are one way to achieve it. The profiles now include:
Investor Bio
Members can describe themselves in their own words.
Contacts & Secondary Contacts
Never lose touch with your members. Members may use either their primary or secondary email in message forums.
LinkedIn Profile
Encourage members to post their LinkedIn profile on Angelsoft!
Investment Portfolio
Previous investments will show on each member’s profile.
Investment Interests
Investors can select industries of interest.
Experience & Expertise
Investors can select industries and areas of expertise.
Participation Preferences
Investors can select group participation preferences, including doing Due Diligence, and Leading Deals
Admin-Only Notes
Administrators can add notes to any member profile, which will only be visible to other administrators of that group.
Last weekend, Angelsoft was migrated to our new infrastructure at Rackspace. eApps, our old hosting provider has not been able to give us support and servers that we need. We spoke to several leading hosting providers and chose Rackspace for their excellent infrastructure and ultra fast support response times: during the installation, I stopped one of the web servers for about 20 seconds, a Rackspace technician contacted me immediately to check whether we are aware of the problems.
Angelsoft is now running on 3 application servers (we had only two at eApps) and a dedicated database/file server. All cutting-edge, multi-CPU machines, running on a gigabit network internally and with 100 Mbs connection to the internet. As Angelsoft’s user base grows, we will be adding more application servers, scaling virtually indefinitely.
To add even more stability and high availability, we will install new monitoring software in next few days. And, to top it all, our document storage will move to Amazon’s S3 service this summer, decreasing delivery time for documents, logos etc, while allowing us to effortlessly expand the storage requirements.
First, I went to the Finovate conference, where I saw a lot of promising startups in the finance space. Most of these companies had raised huge amounts of capital, but there were a few in the sub million angel range that were competing due to the low cost of entry for tech startups. Buxfor in particular was a great example. They were a company of two, had raised about 300,000 in angel funding, and were competing with Mint.com (over 17 million in funding)and Wesabe (4.7 million)!
As an active angel investor, I am faced with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to potential companies with which I can get involved. I receive new business plans every day from people who know what I do; I see all of the deal flow that comes through the professional angel groups to which I belong (such as New York Angels); and recently, with the advent of the Investor Community, I find myself inexorably drawn to seeing the latest investment opportunities from around the country.
But because of the sheer number of companies involved, I, like most other active angels, tend to make very quick, first-pass decisions as to whether we should even bother to look at a plan, let alone invest. (For example, I personally have no interest in real estate investment deals, movie opportunities, or biotech; the first I’ve got enough of, the second is too risky even for me, and the third I’m not smart enough to understand. I also don’t generally look at deals that are too far away from me geographically…although this is beginning to change with the high quality of deals I’ve been seeing in the Investor Community.) This first pass will typically cut by about half the number of companies in my mental in-box.
For most of the rest, however, I have only a limited amount of time to decide which deals warrant further attention. Now, I’d like to say that I carefully read every word of every business plan. But I don’t. I could say that instead, I not-so-carefully read most words of most executive summaries. But, umm, I really don’t do that either. These days, what happens in practice is that I pop over to the Investor Community and skim the latest submissions. My eye is immediately drawn to deals that have videos (because the poster frame of the video is prominently displayed to left of the entry, like this:)
And then, because I’m essentially lazy, I click the video, sit back, and let the entrepreneur tell me why I should look further. It requires no additional action, and fewer brain cells, on my part. Not only that, watching videos is actually fun, whereas reading another business plan…not so. Most importantly, however, a video is an entrepreneur’s one chance to ‘look me in the eye’ and take a shot at conveying his or her essential self. Why is this important? Because as virtually every investor will tell you, in early stage deals our overwhelming preference is to bet the jockey, not the horse. That is, we’d much prefer to bet on someone we think has real entrepreneurial talent, even if the plan requires a bit of tweaking, than take a chance on even a superb plan in the hands of a mediocre entrepreneur. And letting us see you on video, looking right into the camera, is the first step in selling yourself…until we can see you in person.
“But…” I hear you object, “making a video and doing it right takes time and effort”. To which my response is, “Doh!” How much are you trying to raise from angels or VCs? $200,000? $500,000? A million bucks? And how many years of your life are you prepared to commit to this venture? Three years? Five? Ten? Whatever time it takes to do the video right, doesn’t it make sense to do so, if it will help your fundraising to even the teeniest, tiniest degree?
OK, now let’s get to some practical suggestions. In an ideal world, you’d find someone (either a friend, or a professional) who knows how to do videos, and you’d carefully gather B-roll footage, product shots, customer testimonials, and more, and then you’d go into a studio and record yourself talking passionately into the camera in front of a ‘green screen’, and then you or an experienced video editor would cut the whole thing into a gem-like, five minute elevator pitch (but not too, TOO slick, because then we’ll get a little suspicious).
The world, however, is rarely ideal, and if you’re like me (and every other entrepreneur I’ve ever known) you want to get started right away, be finished in half an hour, and do it at your desk. Well, let’s see what we can do to help.
First of all, built right into the Investor Community application, thanks to our friends at Viddler, is a nifty little widget that allows you to click one button, look into your computer’s webcam, and record a live video, which
the Investor Community will then upload and host for you at no charge:
No muss, no fuss, no cost…and absolutely no reason whatsoever that every single entrepreneur shouldn’t have a video included with his or her post to the Investor Community.
But if you want do a better, more professional job, there are quite a few tools available at very reasonable cost to give you a quick and painless way to create a polished pitch video. Putting aside all of the myriad high-end, production and editing packages, two companies in particular have really cool products that are just perfect for this purpose.
On the Mac side of the house, Vara Software has two great programs that you can try out for free, and download instantly. ScreenFlow lets you run your PowerPoint or Keynote presentation on your computer, while simultaneously recording an inset video of YOU, giving us the best of both worlds. Videocue 2 makes it really, really easy to write up your pitch, film it with your webcam while you read from a teleprompter, and seamlessly add in titles, overlays and images. Very cool…and they work.
Almost identical programs are available for Windows systems from Adobe, which last year acquired a really neat company named Serious Magic that had pioneered the whole ‘pro-sumer video upload’ field. Adobe Visual Communicator 3 does even more things than ScreenFlow, including letting you record and deliver your PowerPoint presentation, and Vlog It! is a virtual clone of Videocue. (To be fair, the Serious Magic/Adobe folks claim that it’s the other way around, and that they were first. I’m not choosing sides, just point out two sets of cool programs.)
(By the way, the third Adobe/Serious Magic product in the list is Ovation, which is a VERY powerful program that takes your PowerPoint presentation, adds in a full teleprompter, timer, and other goodies. Definitely cool for doing pitch presentations.)
So there you have it. Now that you know the secrets, please be nice and pander to your friendly local angel investors by recording a video along with your post to the Investor Community. It makes it easier and more fun for us, and gives you a much better chance of rising above all those entrepreneurs who weren’t smart enough to read this blog entry!
Here at Angelsoft, we are rapidly preparing for our first User Group meeting co-inciding with the ACA Summit next week in San Diego.
The theme of the user group meeting is: Unlocking the Network: Sharing Deals with Angelsoft and we have several users slated to speak on the topic. They will cover everything from sharing deals internally, with other groups, and now with OPEN Deals.
If you are an Angelsoft user and you have not yet RSVP’d, please do so immediately as space is limited and running out fast! If you come to the user group event, we will be sure to have your ACA conference materials ready for you, so that you do not have to wait on line at the opening reception.
The event is May 7th, 3-5 PM in the Windsor C conference room located on the third floor of the hotel.
