By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What is your advice to entrepreneurs? What could they do better? Eric: If you’re out there [working for a big company] and you know your customers well, they’re going to ask for things that the company you work for does not want to provide for some
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: So your group funded an airline company? Eric: Yes. The interesting part of the story is the business that we invested in is not doing as well as everyone thought it would do; however, the company has been able to bid for a lot of these
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Eric: We’re very efficient with the way we work with our attorneys; we can typically on our side, do an investment for $20,000 to $25,000 in legal fees. A lot of the documents are fairly templated. You know, you amortize that over $1 million, it’s not a
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: We were talking about one of your investments, Columbia Power Technologies. Eric: It’s a pretty early stage based on how far they have to go to get to where they want to be for us. They have not finished some of the designs on the turbine,
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Why do you think you were not successful at investing in people right out of school? What did you learn from that experience? Eric: There are a lot of mistakes one makes in one’s youth, and no matter what you suggest to these folks as an
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: When you invest do you consider the size of the market? Eric: We just invested in a company that does a catheter for cardiothoracic surgery. It basically is a self-cleaning catheter with a little wire in it and a magnet device that can clear gunk out
Irina: What percentage of equity do you usually seek? Eric: I think at the low end we’ve been in the 5% to 8% [range]. But I’d say our typical equity percentage would be in the 15% range, you know 12% to 20%. Irina: Do you think in terms of the return that you would like?
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Eric: In our last financing, we, the Oregon Angels Fund, put in $650,000; there was another $440,000 that came in from just our investors who are within our group. That was a record but typically, one of our investments is followed by a $100,000 to $200,000 of