Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Dave Whorton, Founder, Tugboat Ventures (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What do you think entrepreneurs could do to be more successful?

Dave: That’s very specific to the entrepreneur, depending on his or her experience and background. But one of the things I would encourage entrepreneurs to do is find trusted advisors; in particular, find trusted board members.

Find people who they really want to partner with, people who they feel that they can be honest with. There appears to be a trust gap – I hear about this every day – between entrepreneurs and their boards. They just feel they can’t be fully honest or fully transparent, or they assume the board can’t handle it, or whatever it may be. That’s an unfortunate situation where that is true.

Constructing your board is a really important thing to do. And you need to do that with people whom you can trust to be good overall board members as well as people in whom you can have 100% confidence in being honest about the problems you’re facing in the business or individually so that they can help you. When that falls short, I think it’s really unfortunate because that means that nobody’s talking about the real issues or solving the real problems.

Irina: What are your personal challenges from day to day?

Dave: Making sure I use my time wisely – time’s our most precious resource – and making sure I’m working on the things that will have the greatest impact in the company that I’m involved with; helping Dafina develop as a great investor herself and trying to do things I can do to help her along. [Dafina Toncheva is Dave’s partner at Tugboat Ventures.]

Irina: What is Dafina’s background?

Dave: She is an immigrant from Bulgaria. She found her own way to the United States without any advice or guidance and applied to many colleges. Fortunately, she was accepted by many with full-ride scholarships and chose to go to Harvard to study computer science. She never had a computer before getting there. She didn’t have the resources to have a computer.

She did exceptionally well at the Harvard CS department, caught the attention of Microsoft, and worked as an engineer and product manager at Microsoft for a few years. Then she went to Stanford Business School and once again caught the attention of some folks, in particular Ray Rothrock of Venrock, who was an advisor to one of her project groups. I think he was really taken by her thoughtfulness and insights and courage, and he ended up bringing her to Venrock and she spent a couple years helping him with his portfolio companies and investment opportunities.

And then I had a chance to meet her in the fall of last year, and we really hit it off and she joined me early this year. I’m super excited about her.

Irina: That’s great. Thank you, Dave.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Dave Whorton, Founder, Tugboat Ventures
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