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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. >>>

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. >>>