Bob is a Director and long-time member of the Pasadena Angels, has been investing in early stage companies for 5 years, and has been held numerous “C” level positions at private and publicly traded companies. To set the stage, as an early stage investor, I look to invest in a “perfect storm” company.  So for an example lets assume a $500k investment in a company with Following on the heals of last week’s post from Andrea Belz, we have another guest blogger, Bob Aholt. Bob also teaches graduate level finance courses at Antioch University.   By Bob Aholt

Jeff Fluhr and his friend from school got together and created a company called StubHub which they built up and sold to eBay. But, you know, I think it wasn't until after my first real company StubHub that people, I think, thought of me in that light. So I contacted the owner of the company and proposed to him that I be a distribution outlet for their product in retail channels outside of the Massachusetts area and began to help that company get In 2000, people had all kinds of assumptions about buying and selling tickets to events. They assumed it was illegal or

Last week, I was on a panel with other investors discussing the “do’s� and “don’ts� of angel and venture capital investing some one from the audience fired a series of intriguing compounded questions � why are the VC’s so illusive?, So let’s talk about the truth about the Angles and the Venture Capital firms; here is a few points to start with: 1- Looking for Money Vs. why don’t they have all their information available? Why don’t they disclose how they come up with their valuations?

RSS ); Why You Should Start a Company in... Los Angeles By: Laura Rich February 26, 2010

The answer is that we have specifically focused on optimizing this company for speed. Yesterday, our 1,000th customer went live here at the Rubicon Project. I have been blown away by how fast this team moves and how quickly we have ramped. So, I took a step back and asked myself, how did we go from zero to 1,000 customers in 6 months?

If the limited partners who fund venture firms either a) change the percent of funds they allocate to VCs or b) don’t come through on their capital calls, we’ll all quickly find the venture community becoming drastically constrained. Instead of making as many new investments, VCs will use their cash for inside rounds to fund their top preforming portfolio companies that have the greatest likelihood of success. There has been a lot of conjecture about how the Venture community will respond to the economic downturn. My personal opinion is that its going to be bad,

This is part of my ongoing series of posts and I need to file this one under both Raising Venture Capital and Startup Advice . Ajax was the new buzzword and many companies went overboard.  and the subsequent acquisition sprees of companies like Google, Yahoo!, I remember going to an Under the Radar conference in 2006 in the heat of the Web 2.0

Many startup companies hire advisory boards.  prominent industry luminaries to be closely associated with the company.  It’s done partly in hopes of gaining their wisdom but it’s also done to portray the company in a positive light through association. The CEO picks prominent people who are busy in their own right with their own companies.  This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice .  It’s very tempting. 

This is part of my series on Raising Venture Capital . I’m sure I’ll spark the ire of some VC’s for saying so, but there is certainly such a thing as black-out days in venture capital.  It is very difficult to raising venture capital between November 15 – January 7th.  It’s worth you knowing this so you don’t waste your time.  It’s also very important to understand so that you can properly plan when you raise money.

Now there are some firms that have strict rules about not funding pre-revenue companies – that’s different.  The problem is that they see hundreds of pitches and they often don’t proactively step back and think about the companies that seemed promising but they weren’t ready to pull the trigger. You should send “update emails” that are very short but highlight some of the achievements you made with the intro saying, This is part of my ongoing series “Pitching a VC” – the outline is here . You’ve pitched several angels