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midwest angels
Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Michael Gruber, Founder and Managing Director, Cornerstone Angels (Part 11)
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What do you think entrepreneurs could do to increase their chances of success? Michael: One is be incredibly honest and open about everything, both good and bad. You need to establish rapport. After the investment, that’s not the end. That’s the beginning. Typically, a company’s going
Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Michael Gruber, Founder and Managing Director, Cornerstone Angels (Part 10)
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Do you co-invest with other angel groups? Michael: Yes. We’re very open to sharing deal flow with others as well as co-investing with other angel groups, with other individuals, even along with venture firms. Irina: With the syndication, what size rounds do you usually participate in?
Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Michael Gruber, Founder and Managing Director, Cornerstone Angels (Part 9)
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: You were talking about alternative energy. Do you have special expertise and connections in the space? Michael: We have lots of connections in the space, in both industry and academia. But a lot of it is really because my other partners and I – this is
Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Michael Gruber, Founder and Managing Director, Cornerstone Angels (Part 8)
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What do you usually allocate for interns to do? Michael: It depends on the timing of the work. A lot of it is helping out with the screening of companies. Some of the stuff is helping with logistics at our meetings. Also, some of it is
Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Michael Gruber, Founder and Managing Director, Cornerstone Angels (Part 7)
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Can you tell us a little more about your VentureLab? Michael: That’s a separate organization. That’s an organization where we’re directly hired by companies to do a variety of services. It’s like any investment bank or professional services company. We’re working with a company and taking
Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Michael Gruber, Founder and Managing Director, Cornerstone Angels (Part 6)
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Michael: One of the key things that we try to do beyond the dollars, what is more important than any dollars that the investors could bring, is helping the company and being on the board of advisors or board of directors, or we find additional ways to
Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Michael Gruber, Founder and Managing Director, Cornerstone Angels (Part 5)
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: In the past 12 months, how many investments have you made? Michael: In 2009, we made seven investments. So far, in 2010, we’ve made three. Two of those three were in companies that were in our portfolio. They came back sort of as an extension of
Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Michael Gruber, Founder and Managing Director, Cornerstone Angels (Part 4)
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: You get about 300 a year. How many deserve a closer look? Michael: It all depends. What we have is a multi-step screening process. We have five screening meetings a year and five investment meetings a year. We basically stagger it. One month we’ll have a
