Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 15)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What do you think the most important thing that angel-backed founders could do to increase their chances of success? Mike: I would say do customer development in parallel with product development.

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 14)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Do any of those have a particularly interesting story? Mike: I guess a couple of them. This is why I like to joke about people who think they know everything. So, Twitter, I actually invested in the prior company, Odeo, which is a podcasting company. And

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 13)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Do you think about exit strategy at all when you’re investing? Mike: Not really. We think, Who might buy this company someday? Could it be public someday? But the thing that we’ve learned is that exit’s going to be so far away that what you believe

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 12)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: So, it’s not necessary that the company had on the team, previous CEO experience, or any senior executive experience? Mike: I think it’s good to have, but sometimes I find that to be overrated. Irina: What do you do with the deals that you don’t invest

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 11)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: So, you really don’t have a lot of interest in the niche markets? Mike: This is another view that we have that’s a little bit subtle, but we don’t talk in terms of available markets. The reason is when I can analyze the total available market,

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 10)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: At what stage of a company’s development do you usually invest? Would you invest in a company that was just an idea on paper? Mike: It varies quite a bit. We’ve funded PowerPoint pitches before, but generally speaking we don’t do that. Our basic belief is

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 9)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: How many deals do you think you’ll be making over the next 12 months? Mike: We’ll probably do somewhere between ten and fifteen investments. Irina: How much do you anticipate you will invest per deal? Mike: That’s good question. Typically, we invest between $250,000 and $1

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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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