 Hello everyone, my name is Eli Velasquez and I am the Director of Venture Development and Venture Well, where our mission is to cultivate a pipeline of inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs driven to solve the world's biggest challenges. I would like to welcome you to today's Just Tech Connect program on De-risking the Deal, Angel Investing in Science and Tech Startups. For the next hour, my colleague Marcia Dawid and I will be fielding and answering your questions. Marcia Dawid is a managing partner at BlueTree Capital Group and a lead investor of the Next Wave Impact Fund, an impact-focused fund designed to increase women's participation in angel investing. Marcia is also an active member at Golden Seeds, which is an investment firm focused on women-led businesses. And finally, she is a board member for the Angel Capital Association. Please join our discussion by sending us your questions and comments through the chat roll on the right side of your screen or through Twitter at hashtag Just Tech Connect. While we wait for your questions to come in, let's start by talking the different kinds of early stage investors and what they look for in potential deals involving startups in emerging countries. Marcia, welcome to the program and why don't you go ahead and field that question. Great. Thanks. Welcome. Hi everybody. Some of the things that early stage investors are really looking for is a solution to a big problem. And when I say that, I mean a solution that has more of something like you might see in an Uber, where there's a problem that is really big and the entrepreneur has gone to find that problem and finds a solution for the problem. You also need to look at your market. And I know we're talking with people from all around the globe today. So market is important. Where are you going to get started? Where are you going to find your first customers? And then how are you going to be able to scale your company? And another thing that we look for is the team. Obviously, the entrepreneur, the founder and maybe co-founder, they they need to have some experience, especially in doing whatever it is their expertise is now going to be. But take a look also at what are the people that are surrounding them? Are there, is there a board of advisors? Is there board of directors yet and who are those people and what's their background? Excellent. I would also add that as investors are looking at deals in emerging countries with with the advent of technology and connectivity to Marsha's point is investors are really looking to see if the startups are exploring global markets and within that have they done the customer discovery, meaning have they spoken to customers in other countries that can help them identify whether their technology or their idea has a fit in other markets other than their own. And so to Marsha's point is is really exploring what sorts of market capabilities exist for the for the technology or for the for the startup. And then have they been able to actually prove that there's some sort of ability to enter and penetrate those markets. The other thing that we're also seeing is the ability for investors to connect amongst other investors. And so as investors are looking at deals in emerging countries, they don't necessarily want to bear all of the risk because they may be early on in their investment activity. So they're also looking to connect with other investors in other countries so that they can help de-risk the deal and potentially pool some funding that can help further add value to the company. So the other question that we have coming in is can you explain the difference between an angel investor and a venture capitalist? Sure. Happy to do that. The biggest thing that I see between angel investing and venture capital while they both look at early stage companies, sometimes venture capitalists look at later stage companies, but an angel investor invests with their own money out of their own checkbook and that makes a big difference. When you're talking to a venture capitalist firm, in a lot of cases, it's their job and it's their job to make money for the people that have put money into that particular venture capitalist fund or however the venture firm works. With angel investors, there's a lot more heart involved. They really look at a company and they like or in some cases don't like so they don't invest in certain deals, but they really make their choices and their decisions from the heart and that's because all the money is coming from their own checkbook. Absolutely. The viewing group at the Information Resource Center in Pugali, Rwanda asks, as a small business, how can you maximize your marketing efforts, especially so you can generate traction and get investors' interests? That's a good question. So I would say the best way that you can really maximize marketing is through your network and helping with social media, things that you're doing that are different, things that can get you some public attention and that and public relations as we call it here in the USPR, that would allow you to be able to take that and then share it across multiple platforms, things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and be able to maximize your efforts that way without having to spend a lot of money. Yeah, that's a great idea. One resource that I have found has been particularly useful is individuals use online investment platforms, but in order to do that, they also leverage things like LinkedIn to do some initial investor discovery and identify people that are investing in that particular industry. Through a professional and cordial introduction on LinkedIn, you can explain who you are and what you're trying to accomplish and sort of the best methods to connect with that investor group or investor groups that they're connected with. One of the things that can be somewhat discouraging to investors is just receiving a lot of information from an entrepreneur without any sort of background or context. But again, if you're using things like LinkedIn, you can use Twitter to advertise and market your efforts. And then taking that to the next step is saying, now that I've partnered your attention, what's the best mechanism to get you to look at my deal? So I don't just infiltrate and provide all sorts of information that may not be necessary for you as a group. A viewer from India asks, is it possible to organize awareness for training sessions for angels on bio and med tech investing? I'm not sure. I mean like an online session? So I would say, I think I can tackle this one. There are a wealth and breadth of resources to start with initially if you are looking to design training programs for your angels. One particular resource that I'll refer to is the board that Marcia sits on, the Angel Capital Association has information there for angel members. But then there are things like the Angel Resource Institute that also provide training sessions and opportunities to garner more education around investing whether it's for a particular industry or for a particular group. So the first step is to start with the information that exists online because there is a breadth of them already. And then if you see something that's of particular interest do some outreach on that behalf to identify how that fits in with your group. This is a very good question. What are some risks Marcia that you can minimize for a very early stage investor? Sure. So early stage investing is a risky business but there are ways that we can look at things and have those risks be a little less. I would say the market that people are looking at, if the market is too small to start out with for example, it's very difficult to see the scalability. Expecting that an entrepreneur is going to come up with a solution or some type of product with their company and be able to get 50 or 60% of the market share is unrealistic. It's going to be a much smaller amount. So in order to get a bigger part, you really need to have a small part of a much bigger market. So really taking a look at the market is important. And with that as you're looking at the market, you need to be talking to customers. Customers can help you so much to tell you what's good, what they like, what they don't like, what they'll pay for and what they won't pay for. And those are things that need to happen very, very early in the thought process of building your business. Let's delve into that concept of customer discovery a little more because it is very relevant and it has really changed the face of how not only startups approach their company, but also how investors are looking at those companies. Marsha, can you give us sort of a high level 101 on the customer discovery process? Sure. In fact, I'll give me a couple of examples. So I've seen some companies that really wanted to build something. Let's just use tech as an example. They wanted to build a tech platform. They wanted their customers to come and use it. Well, as they were going through and building it, they didn't let their customers start to use it until it was perfect. They wanted to have everything seamless and have all the functionalities, all the bells and whistles working. Well, sometimes that's not really the best place to start. Best place to start is with what we call that minimum viable product. So you'll hear sometimes angels or people in this venture capitalist world talk about an MVP. It's important because you want there to be a minimum that your customers can at least use and get accustomed to, and then they can start to give you feedback. I worked with a company recently where they just waited and waited and waited. Then they put their product out there, and by the time they got the product out there, they kind of missed the market. There were other competitors. They didn't really have that first mirror advantage anymore. When I look at another company that I can think of, they put their product out there very early on. It was kind of clunky. It might not have been in its absolute peak of what they wanted to start off with, but they started to get more and more customer feedback, and they made the changes that they needed to in order to make the product great. That's excellent. To Marsha's point, that is a very common practice that is starting to take wave across any industry, any form of startup. You can go out and talk to those customers and get their initial feedback that help guide your minimum viable product. We're going to go back to this question about training for investors. Amit Singh asked, now that we just talked about MedTech, how can we connect with investors in the States who invest in this sector? I'm going to talk a little bit about the just angels. Then, Marsha, if you could talk about maybe a couple of groups that you know, even your own, and how they invest in the biotech health tech sector. We AdventureWell are developing the just angel network, and that is a group of angels across various countries that want to connect deal flow and syndicate deal flow, meaning share deal flow across different countries and establish a true cross-border investment method. Built into that development of that just angel network is also training that will come along with it. We are in the early stages of forming this activity and exploring ways to connect with various countries. Bring folks like Marsha and others that we have in our network to provide best practices on one level, which is the training side. But then on the other side is connectivity to other investor groups in the US and perhaps even other countries that we're connected with. As the just angel network begins to evolve, you'll be hearing more about that online, and you'll be hearing more about that as we market the program. But that's something that you should definitely keep on your radar, and definitely feel free to reach out to me that we can have more conversations about. What about your experiences, Marsha, in connecting to some of these angel investors? Yeah, so the syndication idea in the US has definitely grown in the last, I would say, even recently, two to three, four or five years. And what I mean by that is in maybe five, six years ago angel investors in the US, they tended to only invest in their geographic area, their own backyard, as we call it regionally. And now it really has developed so that there's a lot of syndication throughout the country and throughout the United States. And when we talk about somebody asked specifically about medtech and biotech, and we talked a couple minutes ago about risk. So one of the things with a product, especially when you're talking about biomedtech things, can be very complicated, very science based. For somebody who's not a scientist, it seems kind of overwhelming. So it's important that the strength of the network is utilized so that we can de-risk the ideas and start to look at is this product going to work, even if it's still is in development phase as many medtech and biotech companies are. That's excellent. We're going to talk now about sort of a different level of investing, crowd platforms. So a viewing group at the American Center in Baku, Azerbaijan, ask for some examples of international online fundraising platforms for startups. So there are many, many, many, many platforms out there. And in fact, I'm working, I'm personally working on a project right now with the Angel Capital Association to have some better resources for everyone globally that will help to show what the differences are in those platforms and where you might want to go. Because right now you can go to a platform and maybe they only deal with early stage investing and maybe connecting you to an investor that would be just in the United States. Maybe some others operate more like an online venture capital where there are funds involved. And I know all of this is getting very detailed, but the problem is it is kind of overwhelming to look at all of them and know what one is best for you. So I would start off right now, because there are so many, just looking at what it is that you need. Is it that you need connections to investors or are you looking for maybe getting your product out there in some kind of marketing to tie in a little bit to the question earlier about marketing? There are crowdfunding platforms such as, and I don't know that I call them crowd funding, but things like Kickstarter and Indiegogo where you can put your product up there and start to get sales for that product even before it's completely developed and be able to start to get that customer feedback we've talked about. You will also get interest from investors who see your product and maybe really like it, want to talk to you more about investment. I've seen all kinds of tricks that people have used and tips to be able to help them with a crowdfunding or an online campaign like that. Excellent. I think we can tie two questions together here. Is when should a startup be looking for an investor? And then from your experience, Marcia, what are some of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs have made as they go out and seek those investors and those investments? Okay, yeah, good questions. So I would say that you really want to start looking for investors as soon as you possibly can and preferably before you need an investor because if you really need the money, that doesn't make your company or your opportunity for an investor extremely attractive. So getting advice early on from investors about how to maybe structure your business or what would make your product or your solution more attractive to an investor is something to really start to work on very early on. Some of the mistakes that I've seen are that a company needs to have a plan. And when I say a plan, I don't mean a plan about your business and how you're going to hire people. All of those things are good. Yes, you need those plans. I'm talking about a plan for funding. How are you going to get funding for your company and how much do you need throughout the life cycle of the company all the way to the point where you think you can get somebody to either buy your company or you could take it on to a public market. And if you can say to a future investor, I've thought about this and I'm going to need X number of dollars at this point and then I can build the product a little bit and then I might need some more funding here. And then at that point, I can get revenue and I can sustain myself, come to a cashflow break even and then be able to get acquired. That says an awful lot about the thoughtfulness of the entrepreneur. That's great advice, Marsha. So let's set the tone and kind of where we want to take the conversation next. We started off talking about different kinds of investors, ways that they're looking for investment and sort of the sort of the risking of that venture, also different activities to reach out to investors. So let's get into, you know, assuming we are connecting with these investors now and let's talk a little bit about some technical things that might be explored in the course of the conversation or perhaps even through the engagement of the startup and the investors. So a viewer in Seuss Tunisia asks, in the starting phase, how important is it to spend the money to follow a utility patent? And if you could explain patents or a little background on patent 101 and how important that is for an investor? Sure. So patents are very tricky, especially when you get outside of the United States. They're tricky everywhere, but they're different everywhere. So you need to know the rules of patents really in every country that you could potentially be patenting your product or whatever it is that you're trying to patent. So investors tend to want to see that there is patent protection on a product where there is something that's very, very specific. And a lot of it, what I've seen anyway has to do more with science. It's harder to patent something that is tech because you really can't patent an algorithm. And in a lot of cases with tech companies, even if they could try to patent their ideas, they might not get the type of protection that we're really looking for. And as the person asks the question kind of implied, it can be very costly to do very early and that could hinder the company right out of the gate. So I think the answer at the end of the day is it depends because it depends on the product and how much that product needs to be defended from somebody else coming in. But I will caution that on the other side is are you sure that what you're doing and what you want to patent hasn't already been patented? And there's a thing called freedom to operate, which allows people to go in and find out, is there something else out there or somebody else out there that's doing the same thing? And am I going to get in trouble for infringing on that patent? And that's important to look at at a very early stage, I think more so than doing an actual filing. Filing can come once you get a little farther along. And I would also add that what is startups are using the customer discovery process to help identify how their patent should be framed and how it should be written. And so I've seen it now more and more in the United States with startups that file a patent immediately, then conduct customer discovery only to find out that the customers want a product that is slightly different from a technical perspective, which then forces the company to spend more time and money redoing the patent. And so what we're seeing now is placing the discovery process upfront, in addition to the patent search and the freedom to operate search, and then enabling those two processes combined to help you decide where and how you should file a patent, because ultimately that tells you what the patent should look like, what countries you should be looking at filing that, and where and how this product is ultimately going to be protected. And so that's something to keep in mind as you're filing for a patent. Getting more into the nuances of dealmaking, a viewer at the American Corner in Seuss Tunisia asks, should I give up royalty or equity in order to get investment from venture capitalists? This is a good question for Mr. Wonderful on Shark Tank. He's big into royalty deals. Okay, so that's a good question. And I think, again, we're going to go back to the answer if it depends, but it does depend on a couple of things when you're talking about giving away equity, which is typically what you see at a very early stage. At least in the US, I do not see a lot of deals that start out with a royalty base of any kind. So with that said, in a lot of cases, it is equity early on. And again, the idea of having a plan of how much money you think you're going to need along the way in order to get yourself to revenue and having some positive cash flow coming in is really going to be critical in order to show your investors kind of where you were with the process. That makes sense. No, that makes sense. Here's another question on deal making. We'll talk about dilution. The viewing group in Tunisia asks, angel investors are supposed to provide what is called the seed funding in return or entitled to a portion of the startup stock or equity. Assuming the investment proves to be a good one and the startup has moved on to a new round, there's a risk of the founders losing their stock shares. What are the guarantees in this case against such a risk to safeguard the founders' interests? This is a toughie because once you have agreed to give away equity for whatever it is early on, maybe the company's working with an accelerator or an incubator, and then they want to take on funding, subsequent funding later, there will be dilution. Those are the things that make it even more important to have a funding plan. By looking at how much you need to give away at the beginning, because typically in an early stage deal, a company, if they were raising a series A, for example, it would likely be that the investors would want about 20 to 25 percent equity in the company in order to fund the company. If you start to look at it that way, at the end of the day, you want to make sure that the entrepreneur does not get too diluted because if they do, then they start to lose the interest to be able to keep the business going. They get interested in something else and it's easy to move on. It's important that the founder has a good amount of interest, but it's another question always is, do you want a big piece of a small pie or do you want a small piece of a bigger pie? That's how this ramping up and scaling really happens in an early stage company. Marcia, what would you recommend or what have you seen are some of those protection mechanisms that are put in place for founders? Protection like on a deal? In other words, how does that look for a founder? Is that an agreement? Oh okay, yes. So typically all of these things are done through what's called a term sheet where it's laid out very detailed with lawyers usually so that the protection is both for the entrepreneur and for the investor. Now this is going back to the question about the difference between angel and venture capitalists. Entrepreneurs tend to like to invest with angels or have their investors be angels because angels do have a lot more of a balance of helping the entrepreneur and making sure that they don't get too deluded and don't lose interest in the company and keep that nice balance of equity versus dilution so that everybody wins and that's something that angels are particularly good at. Excellent. I'm going to couple a question that Amrit asked and brought in also. How attractive is the global information technology market for investors right now and let's add to that. What are some of the trends that you're seeing in industries? Trends in industries, we are seeing a lot of tech and I think that some of the things that we tend to see end up, some of the more attractive deals or some of the things that investors tend to like to look at more recently have to do with companies that look like their exit is sooner. I say that because for a long time after the global financial crisis it was very difficult for startup companies to get funding and we found that especially life science companies because there's a very long life cycle to those companies sometimes it takes seven to ten or plus years in order for them to get to an exit it's very difficult. Right now some of the trends that I'm seeing have to do more with tech and how that there's a lot of things going on right now with IoT and helping to make things easier in your home. There's a lot of things to try to make life simpler even though somehow with tech we end up making it more complicated but I would say those are some of the things I've seen lately. Yeah I would agree with you Marcia. IoT which is internet of things is something that we're also seeing a lot of. We're seeing of course medtech and bio is always sort of prevalent always bubbles up. I see things in the energy sector but I haven't seen anything that's really sort of taken off significantly that seems to really stand out. It seems like that industry is always competing in some capacity with various technologies and then there's also this movement across social impact and social entrepreneurship that we're seeing ourselves and I think that has to that's due in large part to the rise of the millennials and there's a lot of millennial entrepreneurs out there you know millennials range from what ages 27 28 to the 30s or something and I might be off of the ages but it's those young entrepreneurs that are really actively connecting globally and finding problems that they want to solve and then utilizing technology with a social component in the social element to help solve those problems and so those are things that we see investors also being attracted to and again to Marcia's point namely I would say from the angel investment side because it's more about the heart and trying to engage with those sorts of entrepreneurs but then even from the venture capital side where they really see this opportunity for global impact and so that that can be a really viable opportunity investment opportunity for VCs so those are just some things that we have seen over the last few years in areas that we're exploring I would also see have been seen a lot of things in the agriculture and food space so again those are areas that that seem to bubble up to the top let's walk let's talk a little bit about the the engagement of the investors Marcia and what that initial conversation should look like with the startup what sorts of questions should they be asking the startup and then sort of what how do they leave it as far as next steps if they're interested in the deal okay so we've talked about a couple things already I think it you know again I can't emphasize enough how important it is to know your customer I know what your customer wants to keep asking the customer over and over again about what they think of your product and what they you can do to improve it as you're talking to investors you want to have a solid plan about how you want to grow your business how you want to scale it what markets you want to go into how big is the market but another thing we haven't really talked about yet that I want to mention is about focus so when a company is talking to an investor and they have lots of great ideas and the ideas really seem so cool and amazing and then all of a sudden there's so many pieces to it an investor can get a little kind of taken aback because they're thinking wow there's a lot of things this entrepreneur is trying to solve how are they going to do all of those things all the same time so I think it's important for an entrepreneur to say look this is what our customers have told us this is what we are good at and this is where our focus is going to be and we are just going to be the absolute best at this one thing to start with then they can add multiple layers down the road but if they can't really do a great job of maximizing that first product or first idea out of the gate it's going to be really difficult to have any of the other parts of the business become successful if they don't have the focus. This next question comes from the US embassy in Quito Ecuador and this is something you and I was talking about before the program should startups in other countries register their companies in the US to attract North American investors? Wow that's a great question and yes Eli and I were just talking about that I'm going to have if I had if I had to say yes or no I would say yes and the reason I would do that is because the the legal and tax implications in the United States to investors are who try to invest in outside investments outside of the US I mean can be very difficult and can be complicated. So complicated that they just might not want to look at that deal because there are a lot of very there's a lot of great deal flow within the United States and if you happen to be an investor in the United States and you have a choice of something that's very complicated versus something that's a lot easier at the end of the day that could be the answer. So I would just keep that in mind again it depends on your company it depends on where you're located and how that how do you expect to grow how you where you expect most your customers to be what makes the most sense for your company but at the end of the day it is difficult for investors to invest if it is if it does not have a US entity. Okay now and I'll add to that from the just angel perspective that is one of the concepts or sort of sort of ideas that we're trying to implement is to shift the viewpoint of US investors toward other countries and where they might be developing deals where angel networks might be emerging and identifying opportunities for for again partnering on certain deals and so that is that is an area that just angels is going to be involved with is helping to de-risk some of those opportunities. Let's let's go to the viewing group in Tunisia and they're asking about valuation. How can a pre-seed sort of set the right valuation and what are some of the key performance indicators and if you would start with a general definition of valuation first. Sure so this is always a tricky one so valuation is essentially what your company is worth at the time that you're getting your first investment and there's something that we call a pre-money valuation and then there's another term called a post-money valuation and pre-money valuation is the the value of your company before you've taken on any investment and if you do some simple math and take whatever you decided the pre-money valuation was add on the investment then you get your post-money valuation. So when we're talking about how to do that it is much much more of an art than a science. There isn't really anything that is super easy about coming up with your valuation. There are several methods and if you want to get into some details you can go to the angelcapitalassociation.org website and there will be some examples of ways that you can calculate a valuation but at the end of the day a valuation is only going to be as high as the amount of money somebody is willing to pay for a certain percent of your company. So for example if they if you wanted to raise let's say five hundred thousand US dollars then you might need to give away 20 percent of your company in order to be able to do that and that's how you would figure out a valuation. So but if somebody if an investor that you're talking to is not willing to give you five hundred thousand dollars for 20 percent and maybe they want 30 percent instead of the 20 then that's going to change your overall valuation. So at the end of the day I think you need to look at several factors. One would be the market as we talked about. How big is it? Where are you going to be able to go? How developed is your product? Are you still in a beta phase? Do you have customers using your product? How many customers do you have? Are you producing any type of revenue? How much revenue is the revenue significant? How about competition? How many other people are out there trying to solve the same problem? You know these are all factors that get taken into into play when you're coming up with a valuation. So I mean we could have a whole webinar just on talking about valuation. So it's it's definitely a tricky subject and I think the more that entrepreneurs can talk to investors and show them very simply how much traction they have gotten so far that's going to help with all those valuation discussions because at the end of the day everything else should be looked at and then you can decide about valuation. But trying to decide about valuation early on after you haven't discussed all of those other things I just mentioned that makes it a little more difficult. Yeah we'll go on another question here on valuation. I don't know if you recall the median valuation for angel networks across the US and if you don't that's okay maybe maybe investments that you've made with your group Marcia what you've seen. But the viewer asks and Seuss asks is a high valuation for a young company a good thing or a bad thing how might it negatively impact the startup. That's a good question so yes I do know the median valuation which was 2.7 million dollars that was based on the information from the Angel Resource Institute's Halo report. That was an app pretty much an average across the United States and we could get into all kinds of things about on the west coast of the US and on the east coast the valuations are different but but at the end of the day having a high valuation too early can absolutely hurt a company and I say that because if you start out with too high of evaluation even though to the entrepreneur side it seems good because you're not giving away as much of your company but again there has to be a balance with the angel or the angel investors or the group of lovers and making the investment you need to have that balance so that everybody feels like they're winning and if your valuation starts off too high and I just had this happen I'm a good example um just the other day I was talking to a company they had they were coming around for their second round of funding and I had not had anything to do with the first round of funding and when they came back for their second round of funding and we're right now in the middle I have to be on call later today about their valuation um and the valuation from the first round was high and during the time uh let's say it was about 18 months that they were that they had the first round of funding they then went and tried to scale the business they didn't get very far they didn't get as far as they thought they would so what ended up happening was now they they ran out of money they need more money and they're trying to get a higher valuation because you don't want to have a lower valuation than what you did in your first round but what happened was they're not going to be able to get higher valuation because they haven't proven their concept so now you go from having a high valuation and you can go right down to what's called a down round and nobody wants a down round because it just hurts hurts everyone yeah that's a black mark on the on the term sheet for sure in the startup let's talk a little bit about bootstrapping um should the company get investors um is there such a thing as too many investors and what does that look like and how do you manage that yeah that's a good question bootstrapping is probably one of the biggest things that an investor is going to look for in a startup company they want to see how how much did you bootstrap the company before you went and actually took on investment dollars and that doesn't necessarily mean that the entrepreneur has to put in a lot of their own money it just means they have to be smart about how to do it and one of the ways i've seen people do it is what we mentioned earlier with a crowd sourcing kind of campaign if you have a product especially consumer product and you can take that to a crowd fund a crowd sourcing platform like Kickstarter or indiegogo and you can raise let's say you know even if it's 50 to 100 thousand dollars in order to get the product developed and into prototype you you've really shown an investor that you have um the tenacity in order to get the product off the ground without necessarily going and finding somebody to give you 50 or 100 thousand dollars and in the process what i like so much about those crowd sourcing platforms is you do get a lot of customer feedback customers are not afraid to tell you i don't like that or i don't like the color i want this uh who knows what they're talking about but yeah it's important to get both of those things and by doing that you haven't given away any part of your company so as far as dilution that's not something that you have to worry about absolutely let's talk about the um sort of the investment levels uh so the barack obama american corner in lagos nigeria asks what are the typical minimum and maximum investment ranges at various stages so if you could explain what pre-seed is angel series a etc got it okay so let's start all the way at the beginning with what we were just talking a minute ago about bootstrapping um the other way to get funding very very early is to be able to go and ask your friends and family and if you do not feel comfortable asking your friends and family then you really shouldn't be doing your business because you should believe in your company so strongly that you should feel very comfortable inviting your friends and family to invest with you and that's usually where a lot of entrepreneurs get started and that's a great place to start the next place would be what would be and i guess i would call that pre-seed would you call that pre-seed i guess so then a seed round s e e d um not c like hat but seed um would be the first um more sophisticated investor maybe an angel group or something like that that would come in um that would and maybe this would even be at an incubator or an accelerator level where um the company's getting some help from a group um not just with financing but also with um with a business plan and maybe they go out and do a couple of pitch competitions and get some money that way um an angel round or um you know some and in some cases it's called an a round some cases called an angel round um um there the there isn't a strict definition but usually it's like more a bigger round um might be 500 us two million dollars um of funding and that's when you might see the valuation of a company be somewhere between two and four million dollars pre-money and what that basically means is that if companies would just use easy math um if they're going to look for a million dollars in funding and they had um they were going to give away basically about 30 of their company then their valuation it would be around between three or four million dollars so essentially um that would be a typical what we kind of see as a typical angel deal and sometimes that can vary um maybe you'll find a company that's a little farther along and they might have a valuation of let's say five to seven million dollars and usually if that's the case it's because they have some significant revenue especially with consumer products many angel groups will look for revenues of somewhere around you know five hundred thousand to a million US dollars it's very good um Wisdom in Nigeria asks is it a requirement and this aligns with the question from Ecuador is it a requirement or an unwritten rule of US angel investors for the startup to be a Delaware company and what is a Delaware company okay good question um okay so a Delaware company just means that um that the company was incorporated in some in some form either through a limited liability corporation or what we call a C corporation um and there's a lot of again a lot of information about that out on the web um the reason why Delaware is because there are specific tax advantages to that particular state in the United States um but I think and that's where people tend to gravitate just because it is the norm it's easy it's simple um unless there's a real if if somebody was going to come from outside of the US and do and have an entity in the US I would recommend that they did that in Delaware um but if there's a reason to do it in another state that's fine too um it just depends on uh kind of what what the motivation is I guess right the group in US Embassy in Quito Ecuador asks do you have any advice for creating a group of local investors that would be willing to invest in Ecuador and other emerging markets forming angel groups yeah you let us a lot about forming angel groups um so do you mean about forming it in Ecuador or forming it in the US for investment in Ecuador so it appears a question is a group of local Ecuadorian investors that would be willing to invest in Ecuador and then also look at emerging markets I see um so probably the the best thing is just to start to network with those uh investors if you are an investor yourself and you want to start an angel group uh it's a matter of getting everybody on the same page finding out who has expertise in what um within your group I mean one of the things that is so powerful about early stage investing in an angel level is the power of the network because as we talked about before I'm not a scientist but I know that I could call Eli and say hey Eli I have this deal and you know he would know somebody who could look at it too or he could do the same thing with me and say hey I have an energy deal um but I'm not an energy person so who do you know and it's all about the power of the network and when you have a local group and you can gather people within your um in your region especially if you want to invest in your region then you want to gather as many of those people as you can have very different backgrounds because when something does come in then they're um that looks interesting to the group you have one or two people in a room that really know it yeah um and I formed an angel group in in Texas and that that group had been trying to form for 20 years they've been exploring forming an angel group um and when when I looked at the area it was a rural area um that hadn't you know it's not really known for deal flows not really known for investment um but when we began to bring the people together the high net worth individuals one of the things we did was customer discovery and and the question was what problem are you wanting to solve for your community and for your region and and through that emerged a lot of different answers but but through the conversation was two things one the investors wanted to connect with their local university but then two investors wanted to generate a financial return which is to be expected and so the university was producing very early stage deals that probably could not produce the level of return they would be looking for so then we looked at developing relationships with other markets in the United States so connecting with Marsha's group and that's actually how Marsha and I met and connecting with other angel groups in other parts of the country that could provide us the deal flow that could meet one criteria that the investors were looking for was financial return on the other side we positioned our angel investors because to Marsha's point they have a heart and they want to give back so we positioned the angels to be very tied to the university community that been working with students that been serving as mentors that meant serving as judges on different events so they could begin to see the deal flow that was emerging very very early on and so what emerged from that was the investment thesis right it's it's the ethos or what the investor network is believes in should be what they're investing in and so over the course of two and a half years the group has invested over 2.7 million dollars across 17 deals across multitudes of geographies in the United States it's got almost 30 members that are very very active and they're syndicating across various networks and so so to the folks in in keto and elsewhere you know the idea is to connect those folks into what what matters to them we'll do this next question Marsha and then we'll start to close up for the investors that are listening where should they be sourcing deals and what has been some sort of best practices that you've experienced in sourcing deals that's a good question so you just mentioned something a minute ago about a thesis and especially if you're in a local region and and you're you should know what it is that you want to invest in are you or do you have things that maybe you don't want to invest in and that helps to streamline where you're going to get deal flow from so you know there's a lot of ways to find deal flow in the US but a lot of that has to do with networking who you know syndicating um some of the best deals that are out there don't get shared on anything like a platform or an angel list or things like that um you really do need to to be using utilizing your network and getting to know people um but really having a good idea about what it is that you're passionate about and what you where you want to put your investment dollars is really important and then knowing sometimes that you might go against that thesis and that's okay too yeah sort of the one-off uh you know deal um when we um began sourcing deals that was the first thing that we did is is design the investment thesis um so the deals must be no more than 10 million dollar valuation they must be at revenue or just about to generate revenue um they must be raising sort of a series A level and then ideally um you know preferred but not required comes in with a lead investor um the group did not really want to take the lead and so those were sort of the sort of the top three ideas and or best pieces of the investment pieces and then underlying that was um an interest in agriculture interest in food interest in the tech sector the IT sector so those are some of the frameworks for the investment thesis and so within that then we were able to do investor discovery with various investor networks who were producing deals that align with that investment thesis whether it was in the united states or elsewhere and so then do you do the outreach so now let's talk to the investors you do the outreach via LinkedIn right that's that's that's a relatively professional platform that you can use and say i'm an investor in Quito Ecuador this is what we look for in deals do you march to dogwood have any deals in your network that align with this right and so that's an opportunity to to begin to explore what the the deal sourcing might look like and what you'll find is once you frame that effectively you're not going to be short on deals um because now you're very focused on what you should be looking for and then you can do a nice outreach to other folks um so that they can begin to send you deals relatively quickly so um in our closing session here marcia what as we conclude what would you say is the most important takeaway for our viewers of all the topics that we've talked about today so for entrepreneurs i would say that uh you want to be solving a big problem know your market have a funding plan make sure that you know what it is that your needs are not just now but in the future and be realistic talk to everybody talk to everybody that you can talk to your customers talk to future investors talk to potential acquirers even if it's super early it doesn't matter you want to talk to as many people as you can and get as much feedback as you can in order to grow your business when we're talking about investors we talked a lot today about the power of networks the power of regional versus more global investing a couple things that we didn't talk about uh and a lot of detail have to do with diversification and i think that's something that's real important for investors to take a look at there are things called funds uh and angels have them venture capitalists have them but funds can be a very good way of taking a smaller amount of your investable capital and putting it amongst many deals and you know it is a risky business being in angel investing so you want to be able to spread that risk and diversification is a great way to do that another thing i'd say for investors is just don't be afraid to ask questions ask as many questions as you can and even if you think the question might either not be relevant or might be a dumb question it's important that you fully understand everything about the company and that you help the company be able to keep it simple and that that just means ask questions as many as you can as many as you possibly can thank you march those are those are very good good solid points my takeaways that i would want to leave with our viewers and again we'll start with the entrepreneurs i can't stress enough this this notion of customer discovery you know and really taking the time to understand the customer's needs there there's plenty of resources is it is it singularity university i believe it has the lean startup course it's free you know it's available online and you can learn some of the concepts for customer discovery and understanding what it is that they want so that you can then better design your business plan better design your investor presentation so that that's one thing two for the entrepreneurs think globally that is so critical and so important in today's age to be thinking about the market beyond your four walls and really going out there and exploring who else is doing this where can i connect where can i partner where can i get more resources so the idea of thinking globally is going to be very very critical as well three for the entrepreneurs do your homework on investors and the ones that you want to connect with i would say there's nothing more frustrating from an investor standpoint and getting some random business plan from somebody that you've never heard of that you've never know and they say please look at my deal and invest in it and that actually just happened to me a couple days ago and and the the it sets a very bad precedent because now you don't know what the entrepreneurs motive is or what they're looking for so do your homework in advance and understand who it is that you want to be connecting with for our investors i would say to marsha's point about asking questions get training educate yourself right go to the go to the conferences go to different events where you can learn and network with each other connect with other angel networks reach out you will find that angels love to hang out with each other they love to learn from each other spend time with each other it's very like-minded individuals that you would be able to connect with regardless of the country regardless of the language that you speak angels are angels i think no matter where i've been three angel investors design a solid investment thesis okay that is going to be critical for a good deal flow for asking good questions and for ultimately managing your portfolio and then last and most importantly investors invest okay write a check write send the money i see time and time again of investors that that talk about investing but they never do and there's nothing more frustrating for an entrepreneur than meeting an investor that doesn't invest okay so unfortunately that is all the time that we have today i want to thank all of our online viewers including those watching with viewing groups across the world at the embassy quito ecuador partnered with the buen trip hub by national center in guayakil ecuador embassy tenease teneja american corner sus teneja embassy kegawi rwanda the barack obama american corner in lago's nigeria youth network for reform at embassy monrovia liberia american center in baku isaac by john and the cup u.s consulate in mumbai india in collaboration with the sargar patel technology business incubator uh marcia also thank you for your time um please visit just network dot org to find out more about upcoming just events and to view a recording of the program stay tuned for information about the next tech connect web chat thank you and we'll see you next time good luck everyone