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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you pay attention to the total available market (TAM)?

Corey: Absolutely. That’s a huge factor, the size of the market. And how accurate we think the entrepreneurs are [in calculating it].

Irina: Do you have a benchmark for what size the market should be?

Corey: No. There’s no predetermined benchmark. It’s on an industry-by-industry basis. That number would be radically different in all different spaces. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What is the typical return that RVI investors seek?

Corey: Like all angel groups, we’re always looking for 5 times and 10 times. We’ve had two exits so far, and both were profitable. I believe it was in the 33% area. I don’t remember the exact figures. We have not had a big 5 times or 10 times hit, yet. But we’ve also not lost, you know, we’re two for two so far in making money. Most angel groups only make money on two or three out of ten deals. So far, we’re two for two. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How many investments have you made in the past 12 months?

Corey: Good question. I would say in the past 12 months, we’ve probably done maybe four deals, maybe five. I think there was a follow-on round with one of our portfolio companies.

Irina: Do you invest in roughly four or five deals a year?

Corey: I’d say on a yearly basis, it’s somewhere in the ballpark of three to six. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Corey: And from all the quality deals, on a weekly basis, we sit down and go all right, this deal’s from this space, who knows that?, and this deal is from this area, who would be good for that? And we target the members whom we think would have an interest in the group and ask them to review the deals.

On a monthly basis, we send out an e-mail with all the new deals to all members. And then in person, at our members’ meeting, we have a roundtable, and before the companies’ presentations happen later in the meeting, at the beginning of the meeting, we go through all these quality deals that we saw in person and we solicit feedback and interest from the members. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How do you swap deals with other angel groups? By e-mail?

Corey: That was how it was done years ago, and it’s still done that way, sometimes but there’s a Web platform called AngelSoft, and that makes it really easy. There are features right inside AngelSoft, so we can just send deals right through the AngelSoft system to any group that uses it. That makes it easy. But there are some groups that don’t like using AngelSoft – the Dallas group, for instance – so, we do it, as you said, I’ll just connect the executive summaries to an e-mail and we’ll swap back and forth that way. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you have any particular industry focus?

Corey: I know a lot of angel groups are focused, if not on one industry, then maybe on just two or three, because their membership pool is really drawn from those space. In Boston, that’s often the case. The population is so big there, I think, often times the individual groups attract people from certain industries, so you get that specific focus.

It’s not like that in our group. It’s a very diverse group, a very libertarian type of group – I don’t mean politically, I just mean as a metaphor. There is a real diversity of people coming from all different spaces with all different kinds backgrounds and experience, so it’s a huge advantage for us because there aren’t too many spaces that we don’t have some kind of background there. So, we can look at a lot of different fields. RVI’s portfolio is very diverse. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Corey: That’s how it went from there, and it developed. I worked part time for my brother for a couple of years, and then I ended up moving out to western Massachusetts to work full time for him.

We were doing consulting work for entrepreneurs. We learned so much about the way investors and entrepreneurs interact and how investors like to be talked to and what kind of things turn them on, what kind of things scare them. So, we started actually working for entrepreneurs doing consulting work, teaching them how to make presentations, how to write executive summaries, and so forth. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

This is the sixth interview in our series on seed financing and angel investing. Corey Silva dropped into the angel universe by chance after being a serious rock n’ roll musician in his early days; he has written over 120 original songs. As fate would have it, he is now an assistant manager at River Valley Investors and a partner at Angel Catalyst, a management and consulting firm he runs with his brother. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

Irina: Hi, Corey. So, River Valley Investors (RVI), where are they based?

Corey: The group is located in western Massachusetts, outside of Springfield. My brother, Paul Silva, is the manager of RVI and I’m the assistant manager. I live around two hours away from where they meet, in southeastern Massachusetts, so I have quite a bit of commuting to do when they have meetings. But the group is based in western Massachusetts, that’s where the majority of the membership is from, although they do have quite a few members from the Boston area who actually trek two hours to go to the meetings. >>>