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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Corey: And from all the quality deals, on a weekly basis, we sit down and go all right, this deal’s from this space, who knows that?, and this deal is from this area, who would be good for that? And we target the members whom we think would have an interest in the group and ask them to review the deals.

On a monthly basis, we send out an e-mail with all the new deals to all members. And then in person, at our members’ meeting, we have a roundtable, and before the companies’ presentations happen later in the meeting, at the beginning of the meeting, we go through all these quality deals that we saw in person and we solicit feedback and interest from the members. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How do you swap deals with other angel groups? By e-mail?

Corey: That was how it was done years ago, and it’s still done that way, sometimes but there’s a Web platform called AngelSoft, and that makes it really easy. There are features right inside AngelSoft, so we can just send deals right through the AngelSoft system to any group that uses it. That makes it easy. But there are some groups that don’t like using AngelSoft – the Dallas group, for instance – so, we do it, as you said, I’ll just connect the executive summaries to an e-mail and we’ll swap back and forth that way. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you have any particular industry focus?

Corey: I know a lot of angel groups are focused, if not on one industry, then maybe on just two or three, because their membership pool is really drawn from those space. In Boston, that’s often the case. The population is so big there, I think, often times the individual groups attract people from certain industries, so you get that specific focus.

It’s not like that in our group. It’s a very diverse group, a very libertarian type of group – I don’t mean politically, I just mean as a metaphor. There is a real diversity of people coming from all different spaces with all different kinds backgrounds and experience, so it’s a huge advantage for us because there aren’t too many spaces that we don’t have some kind of background there. So, we can look at a lot of different fields. RVI’s portfolio is very diverse. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Corey: That’s how it went from there, and it developed. I worked part time for my brother for a couple of years, and then I ended up moving out to western Massachusetts to work full time for him.

We were doing consulting work for entrepreneurs. We learned so much about the way investors and entrepreneurs interact and how investors like to be talked to and what kind of things turn them on, what kind of things scare them. So, we started actually working for entrepreneurs doing consulting work, teaching them how to make presentations, how to write executive summaries, and so forth. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Corey Silva, Assistant Manager, River Valley Investors (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

This is the sixth interview in our series on seed financing and angel investing. Corey Silva dropped into the angel universe by chance after being a serious rock n’ roll musician in his early days; he has written over 120 original songs. As fate would have it, he is now an assistant manager at River Valley Investors and a partner at Angel Catalyst, a management and consulting firm he runs with his brother. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

Irina: Hi, Corey. So, River Valley Investors (RVI), where are they based?

Corey: The group is located in western Massachusetts, outside of Springfield. My brother, Paul Silva, is the manager of RVI and I’m the assistant manager. I live around two hours away from where they meet, in southeastern Massachusetts, so I have quite a bit of commuting to do when they have meetings. But the group is based in western Massachusetts, that’s where the majority of the membership is from, although they do have quite a few members from the Boston area who actually trek two hours to go to the meetings. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Randy Williams, Founder and CEO, Keiretsu Forum (Part 10)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: You do track your returns internally, right? And it’s about 20%?

Randy: That study was done to the end of 2007. We founded it in September 2000, so it was a seven-year study. The next study is being done right now, and that study will be complete probably at the end of the year. So, the past two years, we have not published those returns yet. But, if you want to Google us and look at all our fundings locally in Northern California, you can see what companies we’re funding, and what are some of the key companies we funded over the past four years. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Randy Williams, founder and CEO, Keiretsu Forum (Part 9)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you have any advice for angel-backed companies? What should they do to increase their chances of success?

Randy: Number one, they need to truly integrate and meet the members of the forums that they may be going to and in their markets they know of.

And, I think that they need to find champions within their sectors to help guide them through the labyrinth of angel investing. So, for instance, I encourage companies . . . if you’re a software company, you need to know who’s on the software committee at Keiretsu Forum locally and throughout our chapter system. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Randy Williams, founder and CEO, Keiretsu Forum (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What level of experience do you require entrepreneurs to have? Is that important?

Randy: Yes, we really do like experience, as I alluded to earlier. We like the management team to have past experience. Generally, if they have revenue associated with their company when they come to us, they obviously have relationships with customers. And typically, if that’s the case, then they have some type of success or some other background that we can draw upon that brought them to this position of taking this company toward monetization and/or an exit, that we win and they win. So, to answer your question, yes management needs to have a rich track record of building companies and exiting; that’s critical to us. >>>