By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: How long do you usually prefer to hold a company in your investment portfolio? Kiki: We’d like to hold it five years or less, but the market now is more of an eight-year hold. Depending on the product, some of these are being acquired much earlier.
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: We talked about entrepreneurs’ past experience and how much weight it carries when they are looking for funding. Brian: It’s obviously better if you can grab, as an example, a Brian Lee, who is a co-founder of LegalZoom, and then founded Shoe Dazzle. You can look
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: How many deals have you funded since inception in 2006? Kiki: On our website, it says over $3 million in 18 companies. But this year, our total investment year to date is $926,000 in seven deals, and that’s in 11 months. Well, it’s 10 months, because
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Irina: What your usual round size? Brian: I would say that $500,000 to $1.5 million seems to be the magic number for seed rounds; therefore, the valuation could be as low as $1 million and as high as $4 million or $5 million for that level of dilution
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold This is the forty-third interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Kiki Tidwell, an angel investor and board member of the Northwest Energy Angels, a membership organization of private investors who are interested in funding cleantech entrepreneurs. Founded in 2006 and based
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Brian: If we’re rude in how we go about saying no to entrepreneurs, they’re not going to be likely to come back to us with the next idea. For all intents and purposes, we could be wrong. This current idea may be a brilliant one. It just
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Brian: Our general thesis is that there are very few companies that are going to generate value north of $200 million. Most companies are being acquired in the $20 million to $60 million range, and there are great returns to be had there if you’re invested early
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Chris: Our deal flow seems to be great – as good as or better than we anticipated. As long as we can continue to get good deal flow and increase the number of angels, and there’s good financing [being arranged], the entrepreneurs realize this is an active