The COVID-19 Pandemic has caused every startup to assess how to survive and plan to thrive in the “new normal.” No one knows what the new normal will look like, but based on other jolts to our economic system, we do know that life after this pandemic will be different than life before – at least for a while. Just …
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Author: Dan Rosen
To: The Angel Community
After publishing my companion piece, “How Startups Survive the COVID-19 Economic Crisis,” I have received a number of comments about how this impacts angels and angel investing. Here are my thoughts.
Unlike VCs, who …
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One of my AoA portfolio companies was acquired today by LSI Industries. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/lsi-industries-inc-announces-acquisition-of-virticus-corporation-20120319-00192
Virticus is an integrated set of products and services that reduce energy and maintenance costs by 30-50% through a communication and control system that allows the management of lights individually and collectively. It is a cost-effective solution that scales from 10 lights in a church parking lot …
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Clarisonic, a signature Alliance of Angels portfolio company, was acquired by L’Oreal at the end of 2011 (http://clarisonic.com/about_us/press_releases/press/claire_release_12_15_11.php). David Giuliani, the CEO of Clarisonic, was an AoA member at the time and brought the deal to the group. Naturally, many AoA members immediately invested; I was among them. Those fortunate enough to be in that first round received …
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Carve outs for management is a tool that is often overlooked by boards in angel-backed companies. It is a tool that can be a critical in making an acquisition occur, but is difficult to get right. First of all, both management and the board are often too close and emotionally involved to make a clear decision.
For those that aren’t …
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In my previous post, I noted that the AoA had a great year in 2010. (http://blog.drosenassoc.com/?p=61 or the full release http://drosenassoc.com/AoA%20results%202-23-11.pdf)
Typically, most angel groups or VCs see about 25-40% of their deals die in the first 4 years. (This is called the J curve, since the portfolio value goes negative for the first 3-5 years and gets …
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I am often asked: “my company has achieved its initial goal of getting to $1M in revenue and being cash flow positive. What now?”
In order to grow to be a $10M revenue company, we need to scale up sales and marketing, add new product lines, etc. We therefore need to raise $5M in the business and will need to …
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I was the founding managing partner for Frazier Technology Ventures (http://www.fraziertechnology.com/), which unfortunately was founded in May 2000, possibly the worst time for starting a new venture fund. Up until last week, the fund’s performance was in the middle of the pack (and therefore did not come close to returning capital). This was a financial, professional, and personal …
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Most startups first create a feature. If they are smart, it will be a unique feature that fits a demonstrable customer need in the market and they can have many customers adopt their technology. If the company is really good, they will transform this feature into a product. If that works, they might get to create a series of related …
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