Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Jeff Clavier, Founder And Managing Partner, SoftTech VC (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you require the people to have senior executive experience?

Jeff: No. Half of my entrepreneurs are first-time entrepreneurs. The youngest entrepreneur I’ve backed was nineteen, and he had already done three companies. I think the oldest entrepreneur I’ve backed was fifty-five. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundry Group (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Have you ever thought about what could make your deal flow more efficient?

Brad: I like the chaos. I like the randomness of it. I have plenty of interactions with people. I try to learn at least one thing in every interaction. We’re very focused on investing only in our themes so, we are very quick if something is outside of one of our themes to try to be polite but say it’s not for us. So, we try to be efficient with everyone’s time, ours and the entrepreneurs’. With those entrepreneurs who fit into our themes, we try to engage very quickly. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Jeff Clavier, Founder and Managing Partner, SoftTech VC (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you think about the return you would like to have over a certain period?

Jeff: I don’t really think about the term in terms of time because you can’t force exits, you can’t precipitate things. You can’t say, “Hey, I want this performance over this period of time.”

What I need to convince myself of is that if I look at a business and say, “Hey, based on the valuation that I invest in, can I see a ten times return at some point in the future, five, seven years,” it doesn’t matter, because I believe that there is scale in what I see in that business. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundry Group (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Let’s talk about your deal flow. Where do you get your deals from?

Brad: They come from all over the place. I think a chunk of them come from people who we already either know or have an existing relationship with, who we’ve worked with before. Then a chunk of them come from just outreach from me and my three partners.

We’re all very public. We blog very aggressively about the various themes that we invest in. And we take an approach where all four of us invest in the same types of companies. We all work on everything together so, our approach tends to be one that we describe as thematic. Within each of the themes, we generally try to be intellectual thought leaders around what’s going on at a deep technology and product level in those themes. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Jeff Clavier, Founder and Managing Partner, SoftTech VC (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: In the past twelve months, how many investments have you made?

Jeff: In terms of new investments, not follow-ons, I did twelve.

Irina: What was the average dollar amount that you invested?

Jeff: Those were between $100,000 and $200,000. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundry Group (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

This is the fifteenth interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group , venture capital firm focused on making investments in early-stage information technology, Internet, and software startups, based in Boulder, Colorado. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Jeff Clavier, Founder And Managing Partner, SoftTech VC (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Jeff: Then I look at the product, the concept, is it differentiated? Have I seen ten or twenty versions of this thing in the past? Is it unique? How defensible is it? How replicable is it? Is it something that people are going to look at and say, “Duh, it’s obvious.” They could be doing the same thing.

How can they grow this thing? Is it like, “Well, I’m going to have grow each user one at a time spending money using traditional marketing techniques? Or do I have a shot at using customer referrals and viral link-ins? >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Alan Rossiter, Vice Chairman, Springboard Capital (Part 12)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What do you think angel-backed founders could do to increase their chances of success?

Alan: Have a very rich father. No, seriously, there are a couple of very common errors that companies make that if they could avoid those, they’d really make – particularly the capital raising aspect – a whole lot easier.

One is to seek advice and counsel, possibly from an attorney. Certainly if it’s an attorney, it needs to be a securities attorney, concerning expected investment in terms of valuation. It is a tremendous problem in our industry when people just have no realistic basis to understand what kind of investment would interest an investor. >>>