By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What do you think angel-backed founders could do to increase their chances of success? Alan: Have a very rich father. No, seriously, there are a couple of very common errors that companies make that if they could avoid those, they’d really make – particularly the capital
Alan: Another one is in the financial services arena, and it has been cash flowing now for over twenty-four months, and it doesn’t get any better than that. When a company is just internally building cash, it’s a wonderful thing to see and we’ll probably look at exit on that company possibly even this year
Irina: Do you have any sector preference? Alan: No, but I’ll hit on a couple. First off, one of our criteria – and I call it a soft criterion, but it’s a general guideline that we adhere to – is that within Springboard’s membership, it’s 53 partners, if we don’t have anybody who has expertise
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: At what stage of a company’s development do you usually invest? Alan: Post-revenue. To be a little bit more precise, it’s post-revenue but probably before they have a sufficient customer base to interest the venture funds. Venture funds look at companies at various stages but tend,
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Alan: In our valuation, we generally ignore almost all the analytical things like discounted cash flows and those types of approaches and simply look at exit – and our expectation of exit is never accurate, of course – to try and figure what kind of internal rate
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What’s the average dollar amount you invest? Alan: Normally, the average is about $500,000 that we’ll invest initially in every company. It may be a little less, maybe a little above. The largest initial investment we ever made was about $750,000. But it normally hovers around
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Alan: That would be followed closely by the competitive advantage that the company has, particularly if it’s a sustainable competitive advantage, that would allow them to attack the market. The stage of the company’s development . . . we generally do not look very seriously at pre-revenue
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Alan: Another aspect – and this may be more personal to me than it is to Springboard as an organization – is that one of the other major challenges for angel organizations is communicating with entrepreneurs. When you see as many deals as we do here –