 By: Ham Lord, Managing Director of Launchpad Venture Group and Co-Founder of Seraf-investor.com This post originally appeared on Seraf-investor.com Over the past few years, there has been much talk about the importance of investing both financial and human capital into the rapidly expanding entrepreneurial ecosystem. From our perspective, human capital is as important as financial capital in driving the long term success of startup companies. So how do we go about the job of applying human capital to foster this success? Tags:  By: Marianne Hudson, ACA Executive Director Victory! With lots of work by ACA and many leaders, the House passed the HALOS Act, which would ensure companies presenting in demo days would not have tripped the general solicitation trigger and therefore be required to take extra measures to verify all of their investors are accredited. This is something the entire startup ecosystem – investors, entrepreneurs, accelerators, incubators, universities and more - cares about. We will now concentrate our efforts on the Senate to make the bill a reality. The bill was approved by a 325-89 vote, meaning it was relatively bi-partisan. Tags: General Solicitation 
By Maria Contreras-Sweet, SBA Administrator
Tags: Economy While I was doing some research about some of our ACA Summit speakers, I found that several have penned some really interesting pieces. Angels and entrepreneurs can learn a lot about investing trends and key trends and issues in early stage investing. Here is an incomplete list of articles to check out:  By A.J. Watson of Fundify, LLC in Austin, TX. This article originally appeared on Medium.com Summary: The majority of angel investments are made by investors with no prior industry experience. This is a problem since one of the best indicators of investment success is the investor’s past experience. If you are an angel investor, you should seek to invest in industries where you have experience OR invest alongside investors with prior experience. I believe so strongly in this fact that I’m helping build Fundify.com, a community of industry experts, to help. Tags:  By: Christopher Mirabile, ACA Chair, Launchpad Venture Group, and co-founder of Seraf-investor.com This post originally appeared on Seraf-investor.com In the first article in this deal terms series, we observed that the concepts covered in a typical term sheet can be grouped into four main categories of investor concerns: Deal Economics; Investor Rights/Protection; Governance, Management & Control; and Exits/Liquidity. In the second article in this deal terms series we gave an overview and mapping of all of the key term sheet clauses used by investors to address the concerns in each category. In the third article we dug deeper into the provisions relating to Deal Economics, in the fourth Investor Rights/Protection, and in this article we are going to tackle the Governance, Management and Control category. By: Marianne Hudson, ACA Executive Director Are you an accredited angel investor? We need ten minutes of your time to make a big difference for startup investing. Please take this confidential survey to help us understand who angel investors are, how they became angels, and what factors influence their investing activity. Today ACA and Wharton Entrepreneurship announced a partnership to complete the first-ever comprehensive demographic study of angel investors across the U.S. We believe this study will help identify characteristics of angel investors that have never before been understood. It is critical for entrepreneurs, economic development entities, private market makers, regulators and legislators to understand who angel investors are, in order to drive effective policies to ensure a robust angel investing marketplace and for startups to better access equity capital. By: Marianne Hudson, ACA Executive Director The Angel Capital Association has appreciated the work of leading academics on assessing the impact of angel investors on promising entrepreneurs. A recent blog by Laurent Blasie in the March Digest of the National Bureau of Economic Research does a particularly good job of summarizing the study: Tags: Economy  A few weeks ago I provided a comparison of different debt options for startups. This generated a conversation about debt options for angels and angel groups and whether there were cost-effective ways to tap extra liquidity when needed. There certainly are a broad range of debt offerings emerging as non-bank financial service providers all look for substantial yields. One interesting method is the asset backed financing offered by Merrill Lynch/ BOA and Morgan Stanley, among others. Broker/dealers have always had margin accounts where investors could borrow funds to buy stocks or bonds. Using one’s existing exchange listed shares as collateral for startup financing is new, however. (This refers to investors’ stocks, not those of the entrepreneurs.) Tags: Exits By: Marianne Hudson, ACA Executive Director Many angels, startups, VCs and the startup ecosystem have asked for more clarity about demo days for a couple years now. These events seem to meet the definition of “general solicitation” and most investors don’t want to invest in companies that publicly advertise, but they have seen demo days as an important part of our world for decades. The confusion may get clarity because of the work of a bi-partisan group of Members of Congress. The Angel Capital Association supports HR 4498, the Helping Angels Lead Our Startups Act (HALOS Act) and want to thank Reps. Chabot, Sinema, Hurt and Takai for introducing this bi-partisan bill last week. We believe the HALOS Act helps more job-creating startup companies raise the funding they need because it removes a barrier to funding. There has already been discussed in a hearing of the House Financial Services and could be on a positive track. A similar bill is also in the Senate, with bi-partisan sponsors as well.) |
