Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Are there any other meetings that you have for entrepreneurs?

Mike: Sometimes we’ll introduce the entrepreneur to other people in our network, both to try to help the entrepreneur but also to assess the opportunity. But for the most part, if the phone call goes really well and we do a face-to-face meeting, forty-five minutes into the meeting, Ann and I will say, Hey can we just talk for a second?

And we’ll go into the other room and we’ll talk and we’ll either come back and say, This is great, we’re interested but we’re not ready to invest at this time, or we’ll say, We are ready to invest at this time. What needs to happen for us to figure out if there’s a deal to be done here? >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How many pitches do you receive in a month from all your sources?

Mike: We get about 600 pitches.

Irina: Out of all of those pitches, how many deserve a closer look?

Mike: Out of 600, we’ll probably meet with about thirty or forty. And we might fund one of those companies in a month. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Mike: It’s interesting – and maybe you’ve experienced this, too – in a lot of ways, deal flow, if you’re not careful, becomes like messages in your e-mail inbox. And if you’re not careful, you find yourself becoming an efficient processor of things that don’t matter that much.

So, we try really hard to always come back to the central premise, which is how much of our day are we spending with really smart people? If we’re spending most of the time with really smart people in the emerging areas of technology that we think are going to have a difference, then usually, we judge ourselves as spending our time well. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What is your current source of deal flow?

Mike: That’s a good question. There are quite a few, actually. Some of it just comes in naturally from business plans at Floodgate.com. We probably get about one hundred plans a week from that channel.

Then we get a lot of referrals. Some referrals come from other angels, other venture firms. Increasingly, a lot of the referrals come from entrepreneurs in our network. So, for example, ngmoco, which is a gaming company on the iPhone, we found out about that company from Kevin Rose, who’s the founder of Digg. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Who do you think will come and fill this $6 million to $8 million gap?

Mike: It’s a good question. I guess you could argue that as the gap widens, you could even segment the gap itself. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What are the key drivers of superangel investing?

Mike: There is a combination of things. I think that part of it is low cost, but there’s a subtlety to it as well, which is this notion of hyper-agile behaviors in a company.

So, if you’re able to leverage open source software and these variablized costs around Web services and search engine marketing, you’re able to experiment at a much greater rate. And, if you can experiment at a much greater rate, you can fail quickly on the ideas that don’t work and then double down on the winning ideas faster. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

This is the twelfth interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Mike Maples, managing partner of Floodgate, a fund with the superangel approach that bridges the gap between initial seed money raised from traditional angel investors and traditional VCs, and aims to find the fifteen most valuable companies that are created in any given year. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 15)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Basil: I remember when I was I student, I had no idea about business or life. It’s embarrassing how little we know in our early twenties, and what I’ve been trying to do is influence as many students as I can to think about entrepreneurship as a business and life decision. >>>