Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do teams have to have prior business experience?

Basil: I don’t require that. I don’t think it’s a good filter, because if you look at the track record of entrepreneurs, there’s very little correlation between whether it’s their first venture or their third or fourth or fifth and success. Very often the greatest success is from the entrepreneur’s first company. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: When you invest, what is your average dollar amount?

Basil: That varies. It varies a lot. I can invest anything from $10,000 to $500,000 in one deal.

Irina: How many companies do you have in your portfolio right now?

Basil: Seven. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: If entrepreneurs want to seek funding from you, what would be the proper way for them to do it?

Basil: I probably get asked this question three or four times a week. What I’ve done is I wrote a page on my blog called How to Find an Angel Investor in Vancouver, and I did that just to have the contact information for the local angel groups available so I could just send out a link. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What are your current sources of deal flow?

Basil: Most of the things that I find investment worthy, I’m seeing at an angel meeting. What’s best for entrepreneurs, I think, is to present at group meetings. It’s a much more efficient way for entrepreneurs to meet angel investors and for angel investors to meet entrepreneurs. I belong to three angel groups. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Basil: I appreciated, after doing investing for a while, that the venture capital stage in the process was no longer necessary in well over 99% of tech companies.

I sold my stake in the venture fund that I had cofounded and instead launched what would most commonly be called now an angel fund, even though there are some people who are calling it VC 2.0. I’m not sure that we’ve actually figured out what the names are, but the funds that work today are much smaller than what people think of as venture capital funds of the 1990s and 2000s. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

This is the eleventh interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Basil Peters, an angel investor with a passion for exit transactions who has been founding, financing, growing, and selling technology companies for over two decades. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Basil is the founder, CEO and fund manager of his fund, Fundamental Technologies II.

Irina: Hi, Basil. Tell us briefly about your background.

Basil: I was trained as a computer and electrical engineer and got a PhD here in my hometown, Vancouver. While I was still in graduate school, I started my first company, which was called Nexus Engineering, and we started out manufacturing satellite television and cable television equipment. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Peter Birkeland, RAIN Fund Program Manager, RAIN Source Capital (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What advice would you give to angel-backed companies to increase their chances of success?

Pete: I think the ability to manage cash efficiently while still hitting milestones. We want to know how you are going to use our money to get to your next milestones efficiently. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Peter Birkeland, RAIN Fund Program Manager, RAIN Source Capital (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: You get about 150 deals a month and out of those 150, you invest in one deal a month, so what do you do with the other 149?

Pete: Some of them stay in the process and we keep in touch with them, or they make progress and they come back. Some we try to refer to other sources, other places that maybe look at deals. There are some Web-based sites out there – one of them is Funding Universe – that we have relationships with. Some of them we’ll just write to and say, I’m sorry, this just isn’t a good fit for our network. Best of luck. >>>