Every Business Needs an Angel: Getting the Money You Need to Make Your Business Grow

Inside "The Dinner Club": How Angels Evaluate Entrepreneurs For many entrepreneurs, angel investing has a certain mystique. There simply is not a lot of public knowledge about how business angels function. In this book, we hope to lift that veil of mystery and clearly explain what it takes to obtain angel investment in a fledgling business. To do that, we will rely on firsthand accounts from both entrepreneurs and investors relating their experiences and their advice. As mentioned in our introduction, many of our stories come from the experiences we have had as managers of an early-stage investment group called the Dinner Club. These sixty investors meet monthly to listen to pitches from entrepreneurs and then, as a group, evaluate the companies' prospects and determine whether to make an investment. New CEOs and wannabe entrepreneurs frequently ask us about how groups operate, what the meetings are like, how angels make decisions, and the unwritten rules of the game. To answer these questions, we're going to give you a "peek under the tent," taking you inside a composite Dinner Club meeting. The surprising thing is that this process is being repeated daily in communities across the country, with structured angel groups popping up coast to coast. Yet few entrepreneurs are aware of what it takes to break down the barriers and gain access to what appears to be a "members only" environment. Throughout this book, we will show you the insiders' view and share with you secrets on not only how to find angel investors but, once you've found them, how to convince them to underwrite your great new idea. The Monthly Meeting: Getting Started It's 5:30 on a Monday evening, and rush-hour traffic has snarled all the approaches to Tyson's Corner in northern Virginia, the heart of the high-tech boom outside Washington, D.C. Members of the Dinner Club are due at a private dining room at Maggiano's Little Italy, a family-style eatery famous for large portions and noisy conviviality. As managers of the club, we're responsible for making sure the monthly meetings go smoothly, and now it looks as if rainstorm-slowed traffic is going to create snags. But we're used to it, as is everyone else. This part of Virginia has become a New Economy boomtown, with all the ills and advantages of a fast-growing, commercial hub. A recent Fortune magazine story claimed that the Tyson's area contained more office space than all of downtown Washington, that more people worked in information-technology companies than for the government, and that there were more software engineers in the area than lawyers. The main highway of the area is Route 267, the Dulles Toll Road, a rolling superhighway that stretches from the Washington Beltway to Dulles International Airport and slices through canyons of towering glass and chrome. This has become the main artery of our nation's capital for the telecommunications, networking, and Internet industries. The neon logos on top of the buildings announce only some of the companies: Nextel, Teligent, PSINet, Ciena. And nearby, there's AOL, WorldCom, and Network Solutions, to name a few of the biggest players. This nest of information-services companies may not yet have acquired a name like California's Silicon Valley or New York's Silicon Alley, but it's still got plenty of character and color. The traffic jam that comes with growth is a mixed blessing for our group, being a sign of prosperity but making it a lot harder to get quality meeting time. We've told our presenting entrepreneurs that it's important that they arrive early so they can mix and meet with our members during pre-dinner drinks. And we know they probably want to get a sense of the room and its layout before making what could be a life-altering pitch. They've been coached and given directions, and appear ready. We enter the room reassured--one of the presenters is alreadMay, John is the author of 'Every Business Needs an Angel: Getting the Money You Need to Make Your Business Grow' with ISBN 9780609607787 and ISBN 0609607782.