What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know (Part 3)

Startups are a Social Good

by Brian S. Cohen

[This is the third in a four-part series of excerpts from Brian S. Cohen and John Kador’s book, What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know, which is available on Amazon and at independent bookstores.]

I approach angel investing with a basic premise: startups are good for society and they need angel investors to help them get started and build a strong foundation. That’s why I wanted to write a guide to bring entrepreneurs and angels investors together for their mutual benefit and the benefit of all startup communities. >>>

Future of the Exit, Post CrowdFunding

In April 2013, equity CrowdFunding is not yet legal in America. In the upcoming years, it will become so. This posts reflects on changes we may anticipate once this change occurs.

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What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know (Part 2)

What I’m Looking for in an Entrepreneur

By guest author Brian S. Cohen

[This is the second in a four-part series of excerpts from Brian S. Cohen and John Kador’s forthcoming book, What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know, which is available on Amazon and at independent bookstores.]

What am I looking for in an entrepreneur? I can answer that question in one word.

You.

Yes, you, the humble entrepreneur, are the single most important element of a potential investment. The entire purpose of your pitch is to convince me that you are the special entrepreneur in whom I feel comfortable investing my money and time. >>>

What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know (Part 1)

If You Want Me to Invest in You, Get to Know Me First

By guest author Brian S. Cohen

[This is the first in a four-part series of excerpts from Brian S. Cohen and John Kador’s forthcoming book, which is available for pre-order on Amazon.]

If you want me to invest, it really improves your chances if you do your homework and arrange to get an introduction to me by someone I respect. If you can’t do that, the ideal way to get my attention is to approach me at an investing symposium, business plan competition, or other speaking venue where I have my investing hat on.I am amazed how many emails or calls I get from entrepreneurs who want me to invest in their startups but have not taken any effort to find out the most basic information about me. If founders haven’t done this basic homework before calling me, I have to believe they will be just as lazy when it comes to calling prospects or customers. >>>

The Million Dollar Club: Quantifying The 1Mby1M Value Equation

At 1Mby1M, our agenda is to help you figure out how to put one foot before the other and build a sustainable business, irrespective of financing. If you use the program the way it is designed to be used, you would be able to derive value from it on multiple vectors. Let me quantify that equation for you. >>>

The Million Dollar Club: Conclusion

I know many of you are struggling to figure out how to put one foot before the other in your quest for a successful entrepreneurial journey. I also know that many of you are continuously chasing investors over customers.

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The Million Dollar Club: Freshdesk

Completing our list is Billion Dollar Unicorn club contender Freshdesk. The company was founded in 2010 by CEO Girish Mathrubootham and CTO Shan Krishnasamy. After a series of successful products in his work as a technical architect, Girish was inspired to start Freshdesk by a posting in Y Combinator’s Hacker News. Learning that a major company in the customer support software industry, Zendesk, had raised its prices, Girish and Shan set out to create an affordable alternative. [Note: Zendesk has since had a successful IPO and is valued at ~$2 Billion (May 2015).]

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The Million Dollar Club: InSync

Atul Gupta first began his entrepreneurial ventures in 2003 with an IT provider based in Bhutan, India. His drive to provide software solutions to local small businesses resulted in a move to Kolkata in 2006, where he founded InSync. Over the next three years the company conducted extensive research through their more than 500 domestic customers. Atul noted that once a business reached a certain volume, customers could no longer manage an e-commerce business without an integrated ERP system.

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