Angel Investing

The second Boulder Open Angel Forum event is happening on August 4th at 7pm . In case you aren’t familiar with the Open Angel Forum, the organization is dedicated to providing entrepreneurs with access to the angel investor community based solely on merit and without any fees. The first Open Angel Forum in Boulder was dynamite. David Cohen, the founder/CEO of TechStars drove the event and is also hosting this one. He has scheduled it the night before the TechStars Boulder 2010 Demo Day with the hope of having some out of town angels that are here for Demo Day attend. ...

I’m on an Acela train between Boston and New York (listening to Boston’s More Than A Feeling – how recursive) on my way to the TechStars Boston 2010 Investor / Demo day. I wasn’t able to make it to Boston yesterday for the Angel Boot Camp as I was running around NYC with the CEO of a company I invested in last week introducing him to a bunch of potential customers and partners. ...

Jon Pierce of BetaHouse has decided to organize an Angel Boot Camp in Boston on June 1st. The idea is that anyone interested in learning more about how to get started with angel investing can attend and learn from some people who’ve been there and done that. David Cohen at TechStars wrote about why he thinks it’s important. Jon Pierce also wrote about why he’s doing Angel Boot Camp as well as listing some of Boston’s Best Angel Investors . ...

I know I owe everyone a follow up to my post from last week titled The Proliferation of Standardized Seed Financing Documents . To the many of you out there that emailed me in response, thanks for all of the thought, ideas, suggestions, and offers of help. More on that soon. In the mean time, I noticed today that Dow Jones is running a seminar titled Negotiating an Angel Deal: What Angels, Entrepreneurs & VCs Need to Know . My partner Jason Mendelson is one of the panelists, along with several other notable lawyers and angel investors. If you are interested in this particular topic, I expect there will be a “robust” discussion as I know that the opinions between a few of the folks on the panel vary pretty widely. If you are interested, sign up here.

When I wrote my post titled An Angel Investor Group Move That Makes Me Vomit I expected to write my little rant and be done with it. A month or so later Jason Calacanis picked up the mantle and started a Jihad against the idea of angel groups charging entrepreneurs to pitch to them . The result is the Open Angel Forum. I participated in the second event last week in Boulder. I thought it was spectacular and the twitter stream from #OAFCO reflected this sentiment. About 20 active (at least four investments in the past year) early stage investors (angels and seed stage VCs) attended. Six entrepreneurs presented their companies in short seven minute pitches. Five sponsors underwrote the food and drink at the event. There was plenty of networking before and after. That was it – small, intimate, and highly relevant to all. ...

My monthly column in Entrepreneur Magazine is up (and on the newsstands). This month’s article is titled VC or Angel Money? and has some suggestions for how to think about whether you should be approaching VC’s or Angel’s when raising a round of financing.