By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Do any of the companies you mentioned have any interesting stories? Ira: The one that we’re hoping is going to be the most successful is a company called Avid, which hasn’t gone liquid, yet, so there’s not a lot of information out about it. What’s interesting
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What are your other notable investments? Ira: I recently invested in a company called SURGiVIEW, which has an inexpensive way for surgeons to archive the videos of their surgeries and also to remotely broadcast the surgeries to other parts of the world. I invested in a
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What do you do with the companies you don’t invest in? Ira: We try to refer them to somebody else who may have an interest for one reason or another. Sometimes a company’s too late stage for us and we’ll refer it. Often times we’ll put
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: How much do you usually invest in a company? Ira: I typically invest $25,000. Sometimes it’s as low as $10,000. A few times it’s been $50,000 to $100,000, but it’s usually $25,000. Our group tends to invest somewhere between $300,000 and $750,000, as a group. Irina:
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: If entrepreneurs go through your website, there’s still a fee, right? Ira: Yes. People are not so happy about angel groups that charge fees, but we do charge $45 for people to submit. It’s primarily because we were getting so many random submissions without it. One
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Can you be more specific about the process how your students work with local businesses? Ira: What I mean is that there are local startup companies that recruit our MBA students to work with them on their businesses. The local startup companies want to be part
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Could you be more specific about the fees? Ira: What I mean is that some groups may charge a carry or a management fee. We don’t do that. Our underlying legal structure is a state nonprofit and whenever we make these investments. For example, we have
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold This is the twenty-ninth interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Ira Weiss, who is the faculty director at University of Chicago Booth School of Business (Chicago Booth) and co-manager of Hyde Park Angels, an angel network that is affiliated with the