Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Nova Spivak, West Coast (Part 5)

By guest author Irina Patterson

Nova: Today, the world of angel investing is completely the Wild West. It’s extremely hard to find investors. It’s extremely hard to get them to give you money. And even when they do, it’s not very much. So, there’s a gap right now. Basically, the first one to three million dollars that a company needs is extremely hard to raise. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: George Zachary, General Partner, Charles River Ventures (Part 1)

By guest author Irina Patterson

This is the twenty-fifth interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to George Zachary, general partner of Charles River Ventures, one of the nation’s oldest early-stage venture capital firms.

CRV invests in the data communications and software & services sectors and provides entrepreneurs with access to a combination of financial backing, start-up operations expertise, and strategic business services. Over the past ten years, CRV’s funds have been ranked among the industry’s top performers. George’s personal focus is consumer Internet. He is based in Menlo Park, California. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Nova Spivak, West Coast (Part 4)

By guest author Irina Patterson

Irina: What do you think a single most important thing that angels could do to increase their chances of success?

Nova: I advise a bunch of entrepreneurs and help with some of their companies, and the biggest problem entrepreneurs have today with angel funding is actually getting angel funding because it’s so inefficient.

There’s a lot of angels, but it’s hard to meet them. It’s hard in any kind of of organized way to raise money from angels, and it’s inefficient. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Nova Spivak, West Coast (Part 3)

By guest author Irina Patterson

Irina: How about a team? Do they have to have a complete team?

Nova: No, they have to have the technical lead and the product lead.

Irina: Is there any specific character trait you can identify?

Nova: I’m usually looking for people who are on the technical side. They have to be among the top few percent of talent, kind of when one person can do the work of four people. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Nova Spivak, West Coast (Part 2)

By guest author Irina Patterson

Irina: From all the sources, do you have an idea how many pitches you get a month?

Nova: I would say it’s probably about five to ten a month.

Irina: Out of those five to ten, how many deserve a closer look?

Nova: Usually one or maybe two. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Nova Spivak, West Coast (Part 1)

By guest author Irina Patterson

This is the twenty-fourth interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Nova Spivak, a serial entrepreneur, who is currently the co-founder an president of Live Matrix and an angel investor soon to be based in Los Angeles.

Irina: Hi, Nova. Let’s start with with your background.

Nova: I started EarthWeb in 1994 with some co-founders, and it went public in 1998 and later became Dice.com – that’s the current name of the company.

Then I helped to co-found and build nVention Convergence Ventures, an in-house intellectual property incubator of SRI International and Sarnoff Laboratories, and after that I started my own incubator, called Lucid Ventures in in 2001. Through that, in 2008 I started Twain.com, a semantic Web-based tool for information storage, authoring, and discovery, which was recently bought by Paul Allen-backed semantic Web startup Evri.com. Now Live Matrix, which is my new startup, is my main focus. And since then I’ve done also a quite a bit of angel investing in very early stage companies.

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Russ Fradin, The Bay Area (Part 4)

By guest author Irina Patterson

Irina: Have any of the companies that you invested in exited already?

Russ: Yes, first of all I was an investor in Adify, which is nice. I was investor in Playdom, a social gaming company, that Disney just acquired. I am an investor in one more thing that should exit in October. But as I said, I have only been doing it for eighteen months and it tends to take a while. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Russ Fradin, The Bay Area (Part 3)

By guest author Irina Patterson

Irina: Do you think in terms of equity?

Russ: I don’t have an ownership threshold. I don’t say, I wouldn’t do this unless I can have x percent.

Irina: Do you think about the returns that you might be getting over a period of time?

Russ: The majority I’ve done still recently, so who knows. I don’t do any of them that I don’t think have a great chance of being ten times. Not that they will be, by the way. But I don’t particularly do any of them that I don’t believe can be ten to twenty times more valuable than they are. >>>