Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What do you with those businesses that your fund rejects, if anything?

Basil: I try and help everybody in some way. My personal goal, which I don’t always achieve, but when things are working the way I want them to, I always want to leave every entrepreneur, every company, with something that’s helpful as a result of their contacting me.

Maybe it’s an introduction, maybe it’s a point in the right direction, maybe it’s a little bit of feedback that I hope they can incorporate in their next pitches to investors that are better matches to their kinds of companies. I always try and help.

The only limitations there are just numbers and hours. There are so many people and there are so few hours – at least left in my life anyway. But I try and help.

I have kind of a test. Let’s take accounting as an example. I didn’t study accounting in school, but accounting is an essential skill set for an entrepreneur. If an entrepreneur can’t understand the rudimentary level of accounting, she can’t be an entrepreneur.

If she hasn’t learned it by the time she’s found me, then she’s not ready. It’s like not being able to do email. It’s not an option anymore in the 21st century . . .  and a hundred things like that. Entrepreneurs have to be able and willing to learn to do if they want to succeed today.

Irina: That’s right. Now, can you be more specific about the sectors you prefer to invest in?

Basil: I’m very excited about all of the online business models. The Internet is the biggest thing that’s happened to our species in the past several decades. If you look at where the great fortunes have been made recently, the Internet is always a core part of that.

So, any online business model I’m a fan of. I’ve also had lots of success in wireless companies, broadband infrastructure. I’m not interested today in enterprise software.

Any kind of traditional software is a very difficult business. I’m not interested in hardware because I haven’t seen any hardware opportunities in a long time. I do like networks. I do like any kind of SaaS model as a subset of online business in general.

Those are the kinds of things that I find myself looking at, but I will look at anything in the traditional tech area.

Irina: What about medical devices?

Basil: No. I don’t understand that area as well, so I don’t tend to go there. I won’t say absolutely no. There are a lot of things that are crossovers between tech and medical or tech and life science. But purely medical, it’s just not where my personal expertise lies. There are so many things that I can get excited about that I’m already looking at – and not enough hours – it’s pretty hard to get me looking at something outside of my core passion.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II
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