Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Jason Stoffer, Principal at Maveron (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

This is the fifty-first interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Jason Stoffer, principal at Maveron, a venture fund founded in 1998 by Howard Schultz, the founder and CEO of Starbucks, and Dan Levitan, the banker who took Starbucks public in 1991. (The name “Maveron” was coined from the words “maverick” and “vision.”)

With offices in Seattle and San Francisco, Maveron manages $750 million in capital and invests only in consumer-facing business, mainly in Web-enabled consumer services, education, and health and wellness. >>>

An Interview With Marianne Hudson, Executive Director, Angel Capital Association (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Could you tell us more about Kauffman’s program FastTrac?

Marianne: FastTrac  has a series of different courses, also taught at lots and lots of different local locations and, I believe, on the Web, on everything from starting a business to how to grow your business with lots of different aspects in there. >>>

An Interview With Marianne Hudson, Executive Director, Angel Capital Association (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Marianne: We are focused on helping angel groups grow and do things that are important to their stability and general operations. So, we’ve put together, I think, a lot of good referral services and places for good information.

We have partnered with Angelsoft to make sure that they have free access to their platform that helps them in the management of their organizations. >>>

An Interview With Marianne Hudson, Executive Director, Angel Capital Association (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How do you fund your organization’s work?

Marianne: It comes from a combination of membership dues, events and sponsorships. On the ACEF side, it’s a combination of a series of seminars and workshops that we do all over the country and grants from the Kauffman Foundation, as well as sponsorships.

Irina: What do you do day to day?

Marianne: There are no two days that are the same, but a lot of it is spent making sure we’re developing programming that has value to our members. So, that’s anything from helping put together a couple conferences per year to representing our members in Washington, D.C., watching what’s going on in Congress and in the administration, regulatory agencies, that kind of thing. Also, just working for ACEF, thinking through our educational programming and how we finance it. >>>

An Interview With Marianne Hudson, Executive Director, Angel Capital Association (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

This is the fiftieth interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Marianne Hudson, executive director of the Angel Capital Association.

Overland Park, Kansas-based ACA is is a non-profit trade association. It counts among its members more than 150 angel groups throughout the United States and Canada that represent more than 6,500 angels. The mission of ACA is to support the growth, financial stability, and investment success of member angel groups.

It provides professional development, best practices, networking, and collaboration opportunities for angel investors who belong to member angel groups. The organization also serves as the public policy voice of the angel community and is focused on advancing state and federal policies that support and promote angel investing. >>>

Entrepreneurship Education: Youth Entrepreneurship Course

As a follow-up to my previous post, The Time Has Come For The College Entrepreneur, a question that begs to be answered is: What is the composition of a youth entrepreneurship course? What are the assumptions that need to be made about what students know?

Of course, one of the assumptions needs to be that the student has no business background or business training. Typically, they come from other streams of study and need to take entrepreneurship as a supplemental course.

In addition, give the job prospects, we have to also keep in mind the cost of education. It’s not reasonable to expect a large number of our unemployed youth to go to expensive business school programs and be saddled with large debt burdens. Entrepreneurship education needs to be imparted quickly, efficiently, and at a minimum cost. Ideally, it’s on a live project – a company – a venture – that the student has already started tinkering with.

I have tried to keep these criteria in mind as I have designed the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) program.

I am also curious to hear from educators at high schools and colleges who are coaching and mentoring students facing this deep recession on what, if anything, you are doing to steer them toward entrepreneurship.

The Time Has Come For The College Entrepreneur

America’s youth unemployment is at an all-time high these days. Studies and reports are showing numbers that are scary, depressing, and downright desperate. A Huffington Post article last summer pegged the number of 16–24 year olds who are unemployed at 51.1%. Things have improved a bit since, but the scale of the problem is still staggering.

We need the high schools and colleges in particular to step up and teach practical aspects of an entrepreneurial way of life to their students, and set expectations that kids and young adults will need to take destiny in their own hands. >>>

An Interview With David Monkman, President And CEO, National Business Incubation Association (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How else do you work with your partners?

David: Like any trade association, we depend on partners to help sponsor NBIA and our members. Typically, what we do is we have a level-based sponsorship model. For certain advertising rates, we will promote a partner’s product to our members.

For higher levels of sponsorship, there would be more advertising channels employed and a greater number of impressions sought. So, for example, the cost per impression for a $5,000 sponsorship would be close to 30,000 impressions.

A $50,000 sponsorship, just to give you a sense of how large the range can be, would involve more than 1 million impressions. So, we try to be an advertising partner for vendors that want to provide services to incubator managers or their clients. >>>