Entrepreneurship Education: Who Is the Right Seed Investor For You?

I am sure many of you are reading 1M/1M Ambassador Irina Patterson’s Seed Capital series where she’s interviewing seed investors from various walks of life, and with a diverse set of perspectives. Whereas Mike Maples is interested in the top 15 deals in Silicon Valley each year, Basil Peters likes to invest in businesses that

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: How do you conduct your due diligence? Mike: That’s the hard part because Ann and I are little bit emotional in our investing styles. We believe that the greatest outcomes tend to be controversial when they’re funded. For example, Twitter was very controversial when it was

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Are there any other meetings that you have for entrepreneurs? Mike: Sometimes we’ll introduce the entrepreneur to other people in our network, both to try to help the entrepreneur but also to assess the opportunity. But for the most part, if the phone call goes really

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: How many pitches do you receive in a month from all your sources? Mike: We get about 600 pitches. Irina: Out of all of those pitches, how many deserve a closer look? Mike: Out of 600, we’ll probably meet with about thirty or forty. And we

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Mike: It’s interesting – and maybe you’ve experienced this, too – in a lot of ways, deal flow, if you’re not careful, becomes like messages in your e-mail inbox. And if you’re not careful, you find yourself becoming an efficient processor of things that don’t matter that

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What is your current source of deal flow? Mike: That’s a good question. There are quite a few, actually. Some of it just comes in naturally from business plans at Floodgate.com. We probably get about one hundred plans a week from that channel. Then we get

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Who do you think will come and fill this $6 million to $8 million gap? Mike: It’s a good question. I guess you could argue that as the gap widens, you could even segment the gap itself.

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What are the key drivers of superangel investing? Mike: There is a combination of things. I think that part of it is low cost, but there’s a subtlety to it as well, which is this notion of hyper-agile behaviors in a company. So, if you’re able

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