Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Russ Fradin, The Bay Area (Part 2)

By guest author Irina Patterson

Irina: If an entrepreneur decides to seek funding from you, what is the best way to reach you?

Russ: I am maybe the easiest person in the world to get a hold of. I will meet with almost anyone if I think there is some interesting reason to do it.

Personal connections and introductions are always better than random, blind e-mails. But I had a person I just invested in whom I haven’t met before. He blind e-mailed me, and he happened to know just one person whom I knew a little bit. I met them and I was really impressed with what they are doing. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Russ Fradin, The Bay Area (Part 1)

By guest author Irina Patterson

This is the twenty-third interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Russ Fradin, a serial entrepreneur, who is currently the cofounder and president of Adify and angel investor in the Bay Area. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Geoff Ralston, Silicon Valley (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Geoff: Sometimes I’ll say to entrepreneurs, “You have a decent idea but your pitch sucks. You’ve got to learn how to take your idea and sell it. If you’re going to go through PowerPoints about X, Y, and Z, this isn’t why I invest. This isn’t how you sell someone.” >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Geoff Ralston, Silicon Valley (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What is your criterion for market size?

Geoff: There are exceptions to this, but I tend to only want to invest in startups that have significant or large upsides. I try to avoid putting fixed numbers on that other than I have it in my mind. If I can’t see a path to a $100 million in revenue, it doesn’t seem so interesting. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Geoff Ralston, Silicon Valley (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: From all your sources, how many pitches do you receive a month, approximately?

Geoff: It’s kind of hard to say because I’ve only just cranked this thing up again. For a while, I was very involved with Y Combinator, so it was kind of dominating [my time], so I don’t know.

How many different deals do I see per month? I would say it’s almost as many as I want. I think I get more than I can handle. I guess probably right now what I see is three or four deals, maybe five deals a week. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Geoff Ralston, Silicon Valley (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

This is the twenty-second interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Geoff Ralston, a Silicon Valley angel investor and serial entrepreneur who started and ran a number of companies and held senior positions at Yahoo! after one of his companies, RocketMail, was acquired. >>>

Seed Capital From The Government: SBA’s Sean Greene (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Sramana: Let me ask you a specific question along those lines as a follow-up about education. Education is an area where we’re seeing a lot of interest among entrepreneurs. It’s clear that education is a big problem that needs to be solved by a variety of people. Does the Department of Education fall into this world? Is there any interaction between the SBA and the Department of Education? >>>

Seed Capital From The Government: SBA’s Sean Greene (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Sramana: What other programs are you thinking about or incubating within your charter that are going to help this ecosystem that we work with and you work with?

Sean: The SBIC program, again, it is a fund of funds. For the most part, it’s later stage capital, still an incredibly important part of high-growth entrepreneurship. As it relates to earlier stage, we’re in the process of launching a targeted program in the clean tech space that would provide matching funds to funds that are focusing on early-stage investment in clean tech. >>>