By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What do you look for in the people? I see you’re very young yourself. What kind of experience do you look for in the people? Christina: For two of the companies I’ve invested in, the founders have been very young. I think both of them were
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: When you see a promising pitch, what is your next step? Christina: It’s two ways. If I just read about something that I like, or hear from somebody, I’ll usually reach out to [the entrepreneur], and say, “Hey, I’m really interested. Let’s sit down and grab
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: You were talking about public debate about angels versus VCs, throughout the blogosphere and how in some instances it has gotten pretty colorful. Mike: Yes, it doesn’t make sense to be antagonizing an entire category of investors that you’re going to need to be partnering with.
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold This is the thirty-eighth interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Christina Brodbeck, a Silicon Valley angel investor and the co-founder of a soon-to-be-launched startup called TheIceBreak. Christina was part of the YouTube founding team. She designed YouTube’s first user interface and
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 Mike: If a company is not coalescing into something where you think it’s a very big outcome, in that case, what you want to do is think about either getting cash flow positive on the existing positive, or if there’s going to be a need for more
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 Irina: What are some character traits that you look for in entrepreneurs? Mike: You know, if we had to generalize, the things that most likely to get us excited, that correlate to success are extraordinary product abilities, in terms of functional expertise, and then that intangible but