Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: If entrepreneurs want to seek funding from you, what would be the proper way for them to do it?

Basil: I probably get asked this question three or four times a week. What I’ve done is I wrote a page on my blog called How to Find an Angel Investor in Vancouver, and I did that just to have the contact information for the local angel groups available so I could just send out a link.

I think that the efficient answer for the entrepreneurs is to get in front of an angel group. The next choice would be to network until they could find a way to get an introduction to an angel investor. The best types of introductions are ones where the person making the introduction has already made an investment. It’s like a lot of these social things, it’s very hard to get the first couple but after you get it going, it works quite well.

It’s hard. It’s hard for entrepreneurs to find angel investors. It’s not an efficient process. I’m a bit of a rare angel investor in that I purposely have a high profile. I put my contact information up on my website. People can find me, and that’s because I’m also interested in putting something back. Most of my friends, who are angel investors, do everything they can to maintain a low profile and that’s because they don’t want to receive hundreds of unsolicited investment proposals. They don’t want to have stock brokers calling them.

Irina: On average, how many pitches do you actually get to look at each month?

Basil: My personal goal is to try and look at one company a day, but I don’t always make that. So, probably in a month, I would look, seriously, at about 15 or 20 a month.

Irina: And out of these 15 or 20, how many deserve a closer look?

Basil: It’s kind of a funnel. That 15 or 20 will narrow down to only a couple investments a year. Two or three investments a year. And the reason is that I don’t have time to manage more than let’s say eight or ten investments . . .  not the way that I would like to. I’m an active investor. I have some angel friends who are less active.

But I like to be able to add some value to the companies that I’m invested in. Typically, for me, I will be an investor in a company for let’s say three or four years. So, if I invest in a couple a year, then I have kind of a continuous portfolio of eight or ten, which for me and my style, is kind of an optimal number.

Irina: What is the next step when you decide to invest in a company?

Basil: It’s a process. The first step for me is usually to see a presentation, and that has to be 12 minutes or less. Most of the time, that first presentation is the most important first step in the decision tree.

If I want more information, I’ll usually get it from what entrepreneurs have put up on AngelSoft. Then, maybe, if I’m still interested, it’s usually a phone call, then a face-to-face meeting. There are several face-to-face meetings.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II
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