Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Russ Fradin, The Bay Area (Part 3)

By guest author Irina Patterson Irina: Do you think in terms of equity? Russ: I don’t have an ownership threshold. I don’t say, I wouldn’t do this unless I can have x percent. Irina: Do you think about the returns that you might be getting over a period of time? Russ: The majority I’ve done

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Russ Fradin, The Bay Area (Part 2)

By guest author Irina Patterson Irina: If an entrepreneur decides to seek funding from you, what is the best way to reach you? Russ: I am maybe the easiest person in the world to get a hold of. I will meet with almost anyone if I think there is some interesting reason to do it.

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Russ Fradin, The Bay Area (Part 1)

By guest author Irina Patterson This is the twenty-third interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Russ Fradin, a serial entrepreneur, who is currently the cofounder and president of Adify and angel investor in the Bay Area.

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Geoff Ralston, Silicon Valley (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Geoff: Sometimes I’ll say to entrepreneurs, “You have a decent idea but your pitch sucks. You’ve got to learn how to take your idea and sell it. If you’re going to go through PowerPoints about X, Y, and Z, this isn’t why I invest. This isn’t how

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Geoff Ralston, Silicon Valley (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What is your criterion for market size? Geoff: There are exceptions to this, but I tend to only want to invest in startups that have significant or large upsides. I try to avoid putting fixed numbers on that other than I have it in my mind.

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Geoff Ralston, Silicon Valley (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: From all your sources, how many pitches do you receive a month, approximately? Geoff: It’s kind of hard to say because I’ve only just cranked this thing up again. For a while, I was very involved with Y Combinator, so it was kind of dominating [my

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Geoff Ralston, Silicon Valley (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold This is the twenty-second interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Geoff Ralston, a Silicon Valley angel investor and serial entrepreneur who started and ran a number of companies and held senior positions at Yahoo! after one of his companies, RocketMail, was

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Seed Capital From The Government: SBA’s Sean Greene (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Sramana: Let me ask you a specific question along those lines as a follow-up about education. Education is an area where we’re seeing a lot of interest among entrepreneurs. It’s clear that education is a big problem that needs to be solved by a

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