Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundry Group (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you have any preferred investment types? What is it? Preferred shares?

Brad: Yes, we always make equity investments and we almost always take preferred shares.

Irina: Do you think about exit strategy when you invest?

Brad: We don’t think about it. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Ho Nam, General Partner, Altos Ventures (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Ho: Somebody who comes in with a fantastic-looking resume will disappoint you many times. If we think we can work with somebody, we’ll err on the side of really trying to help that person. Even if they make mistakes and we’re learning on the jobs all of us together . . . building a company’s a very iterative process. We’ll go ahead and try to work with the founder. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Ho Nam, General Partner, Altos Ventures (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What is your current source of deal flow?

Ho: Most deals we get come from our network. We have several thousand people working across our different portfolio companies, so the network has grown over time; entrepreneurs we’ve worked with in the past or people who have heard about us through our network.

We also get deals from other investors who know we’re looking to invest smaller dollar amounts, maybe at earlier stages than some of the larger funds. Then there’s also the network of bankers and lawyers and other service providers – typical network in Silicon Valley. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundry Group (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: And what about your equity share and your returns? Do you have any rules about those numbers?

Brad: Again, it varies dramatically. We don’t have a specific rule. Our goal is to work with entrepreneurs to build as much value as possible.

Irina: What stage of the business development do you usually prefer to invest in?

Brad: I think, almost exclusively we invest early in lots of these companies. Our seed investments are often are couple of people and an idea. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundry Group (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Brad: And then we look at the actual entrepreneurs behind the product, and we do that in concert. I don’t actually think you can really evaluate a product effectively without using it or having interactions with the entrepreneurs so, we tend to lump those two together. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Ho Nam, General Partner, Altos Ventures (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

This is the sixteenth interview in our series on seed financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Ho Nam, general partner at Altos Ventures, a first-stage venture capital firm, based in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley.

Irina: Hi, Ho. Why don’t you start with your background?

Ho: I got started at Bain & Company, a management consulting firm, and got a taste of venture capital business in the early days. I was at Bain from 1988 to 1990. At that time there were only two offices in the whole country, San Francisco and Boston. Bain did some work with smaller companies for equity compensation. We worked for a company called Lattice Semiconductor, which I think might still be their client after twenty years or so. We were hired by the new CEO before it went public. That gave me an interesting view into startups and reporting to a board. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundry Group (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How do you spend time with the entrepreneurs?

Brad: They come to us and we go to them; we spend a lot of time together. I think it’s really us developing that relationship with them. We made an investment recently in a company called Sifteo, I’m thinking of that as an example. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Jeff Clavier, Founder and Managing Partner, SoftTech VC (Part 9)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Jeff: The one thing that we have going for us is that we do see so many patterns and so many deals and teams. We’ve done so many experiments – eighty-two, in my case, over six years – and seen what’s successful and what’s unsuccessful.

Each deal is different, but you look for patterns of success and try to avoid patterns of failure. >>>