Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 14)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: And now what could angels do to increase their chances of success?

Basil: I think for angels . . . number one is education. Angel investing is also changing right now, faster than ever before. There have been angels since we lived in caves.

We didn’t call them angel investors back then, but there have always been individual rich people who made investments in early companies.

But what’s happened in the past five to ten years is that we for the first time are having organized angel education. The biggest driver that’s doing this is the Angel Capital Association and their affiliated Angel Capital Education Foundation.

What they’ve been doing, with support from the Kauffman Foundation, is having classes on angel investment all around North America. The Angel Capital Education Foundation is producing thousands of much smarter angel investors.

Investing is hard. Investing is like . . . if it were a university course, it would be a graduate course because it’s not an easy thing to learn to do. And you can’t take a course on it. The only way you can learn about angel investing is from this one group that’s doing education or from other angels, which is the other way that angels are educating themselves.

Angels are getting much, much more sophisticated very quickly, and that is making an incredible difference not just to the angels, but also to the North American economy.

Smarter angels are building more, smarter companies and creating new growth, and I’m sure that you’ve seen the statistics that say that most of the new jobs in America have been created by angel-backed companies. That’s where all the jobs come from, from young companies. We need more entrepreneurs.

Irina: What do you think would help us to get more entrepreneurs?

Basil: I think what Sramana is doing with the 1M/1M initiative is probably the most inspired strategy. My belief is that there are more entrepreneurs out there than there are people who know that they’re entrepreneurs.

What I’m trying to say is that there are more people who could be entrepreneurs, but they don’t know that they could do this. They don’t know that it’s a life choice.

What I do as part of my goal of putting something back is that I regularly speak in front of groups of students because I think that I can make a bigger difference for people of that age.

This segment is part 14 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II
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