Understanding Angel Investing

Are you in or have you been interested in the high growth ventures? Did you ever wonder what Angel and Venture Capital Investing are all about and how to participate? Have you wanted to get in on the ground floor of ventures that explode into billion dollar IPOs like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Zynga? I will explain how ventures seek money, how angel investments work, and how they generate above average returns compared to the stock market. I’ll introduce the new and unique accelerator fund, which generates even higher returns with less risk.

Registration is required.

The average startup faces a one in ten thousand chance at getting funding.  Would you like to increase that to one in three?

The Bay Area Entrepreneur (BAE) Funding Accelerator features our proven process to dramatically increase your funding prospects.

You know the San Francisco Bay Area is the center of the world for angel and VC investors.  It’s THE place to be to secure your next round.  But not everyone can be or wants to move there.  Now you don’t have to be.  We bring Silicon Valley to you … whether you’re located in San Jose, Dallas like me, or anywhere else in the world.

Our program starts with $10,000 in seed capital.  Then our workshop shares eight weekly sessions with personal coaching to get your business plan and presentation fully investor-ready.  The meetings are delivered in person if you’re in the Bay Area and via the web anywhere else in the world.  Lastly we personally introduce you and go with you to meet Bay Area angel and VC investors. Our seed investment more than covers the $1,500 workshop fee and your travel expenses if you’re not local.

BAE makes getting funding even simpler, no matter where you’re located.  Best of all, applying or presenting to BAE costs you nothing.  Send your Executive Summary now to me at marc@baeworkshop.com to be considered for our Winter program.  Our Portfolio is already filling up.  So don’t delay!

Marc Freedman
Managing Director
marc@baeworkshop.com
972-200-3490

Bay Area Entrepreneurs Workshop & Investments
Investability. Simplified.

Not so fast. The first clue is that Wahooly charges a monthly fee of up to $450.  They’re not stupid.  If you’re a startup, they want your money, not your stock.

Even worse, it’s a sucker’s bet for online influencers.  Multiple the paltry number of shares you would get with the miniscule probability of success of a typical startup divided by the desperation factor of a company that doesn’t have a real marketing plan and sinks to such a program times the reality that dilution makes your stock worth a fraction of what you expected in the miracle event the company has a successful exit.  The average value comes to bupkes.

Do you really want to turn off your friends, business associates, and network and devalue your personal brand for that?

Real online influencers who don’t mind being bought, er sponsored, get cash or a junket to Maui (my operators are standing by).

If you’re not at that level, you’re much better off sticking with the free promotional USB drive, happy hour drink, or steak dinner their PR firm offers.  Failing that, at least get a photo of you and a hot booth babe or boytoy.

“███████ Of ██████ and █████████ are ██████ at the hip. You can’t ████ one ███████ the █████. But ██████████ not all of our ███████ █████████ (██████ I say ██████ ███████ █████████) ██████████ ████. ██████ ███████ █████ ████ who is now ████ of the ████ ████ the █████████ ████ ████: ████ the ███████ ████ ██████ ████ ████ had to █████ █████ or ████ ██████’t do [████████] in █████ ███████, ████ ███████ to ██████ out how to █████ █████. He ████ ████ in ███████ of the ████’s ███████ ████ ████████ █████ the “████████ of █████” as a way to ██████ ██████. ████ I’m ████ to ████ you ████ ████████ of █████ is in ██████ ████████ to the ██████ of ████ ██████. It is ██████████. You’d █████ a ██████ ███████ █████ ████ ████.”

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The Senate bill is called Protect IP. In the House it’s E-Parasites. Of course it’s big business’s IP that they seek to protect and the parasites are them for transforming your friendly neighborhood ISP into their direct attack dog.

Once more they overreach in the name of online piracy, which is getting old. This legislation chills innovation, compromises online security, and strips consumer rights. It was written with no input from the technology industry or consumer advocates.

Please take direct action now. Tell your representatives in Congress to keep their slimy hands off your Internet through the EFF Action site.

We like to think that we’re in control, that we have free will, and that we’ve conquered evolution, assuming you believe in it.  We proactively lead our lives through that relatively newfangled piece of wetware, the logical neocortex part of our brain.

Yeah, right.  That’s not really thinking.  It’s feeling.  The primitive limbic system that evolved over millions of years is what rules.  This part of our noggin is responsible for emotion, behavior, long-term memory, and obsessing on reality shows.

We think we’re smart.  Warning labels work.  Advertising can be ignored.  Companies will police themselves. But none of that works.  That’s the just the tip of the subconscious iceberg.  The patterns and rhythms of jungle and tribe are our blood music, embedded  in the fabric of human existence and our very thoughts. We’re just clever monkeys.

Reality is not objective.  It’s not subjective.  It’s social.

Truly we can’t handle the truth.  We’re just built that way.  The power of memes is a direct descendent of the power of our genes.

So there is no one truth.  The truthsayers are not the logicians, scientists, and engineers.  They are the writers, preachers, and marketers like me.  We are the storytellers.  And we own you in ways you will never know.

David Brooks:

Daniel Kahneman spent part of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris. Like the other Jews, he had to wear a Star of David on the outside of his clothing. One evening, when he was about 7 years old, he stayed late at a friend’s house, past the 6 p.m. curfew.

He turned his sweater inside out to hide the star and tried to sneak home. A German SS trooper approached him on the street, picked him up and gave him a long, emotional hug. The soldier displayed a photo of his own son, spoke passionately about how much he missed him and gave Kahneman some money as a sentimental present. The whole time Kahneman was terrified that the SS trooper might notice the yellow star peeking out from inside his sweater.

Kahneman finally made it home, convinced that people are complicated and bizarre. He went on to become one of the world’s most influential psychologists and to win the Nobel in economic science.

Kahneman doesn’t actually tell that childhood story in his forthcoming book. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is an intellectual memoir, not a personal one. The book is, nonetheless, sure to be a major intellectual event (look for an excerpt in The Times Magazine this Sunday) because it superbly encapsulates Kahneman’s research, and the vast tide of work that has been sparked by it.

I’d like to use this column not to summarize the book but to describe why I think Kahneman and his research partner, the late Amos Tversky, will be remembered hundreds of years from now, and how their work helped instigate a cultural shift that is already producing astounding results.

Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that when they depart from reason it’s because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment.

Kahneman and Tversky conducted experiments. They proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old models and that the flaws are not just in the passions but in the machinery of cognition. They demonstrated that people rely on unconscious biases and rules of thumb to navigate the world, for good and ill. Many of these biases have become famous: priming, framing, loss-aversion.

Kahneman reports on some delightful recent illustrations from other researchers. Pro golfers putt more accurately from all distances when putting for par than when putting for birdie because they fear the bogie more than they desire the birdie. Israeli parole boards grant parole to about 35 percent of the prisoners they see, except when they hear a case in the hour just after mealtime. In those cases, they grant parole 65 percent of the time. Shoppers will buy many more cans of soup if you put a sign atop the display that reads “Limit 12 per customer.”

Kahneman and Tversky were not given to broad claims. But the work they and others did led to the reappreciation of several old big ideas:

We are dual process thinkers. We have two interrelated systems running in our heads. One is slow, deliberate and arduous (our conscious reasoning). The other is fast, associative, automatic and supple (our unconscious pattern recognition). There is now a complex debate over the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two systems. In popular terms, think of it as the debate between “Moneyball” (look at the data) and “Blink” (go with your intuition).

We are not blank slates. All humans seem to share similar sets of biases. There is such a thing as universal human nature. The trick is to understand the universals and how tightly or loosely they tie us down.

We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our own ships, but, in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can’t see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.

This research yielded a different vision of human nature and a different set of debates. The work of Kahneman and Tversky was a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.

They also figured out ways to navigate around our shortcomings. Kahneman champions the idea of “adversarial collaboration” — when studying something, work with people you disagree with. Tversky had a wise maxim: “Let us take what the terrain gives.” Don’t overreach. Understand what your circumstances are offering.

Many people are exploring the inner wilderness. Kahneman and Tversky are like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.

Sorry, Christies, teabaggers, and Republicans.  You can’ wave your hands, wait for fantasy superfriends, revel in the mythology of the past, or rely on “common sense.”  You really do have to look at facts.  Not that I expect logic, reflection, or cerebration to change your mind.

There is one bright light here – the latest generation of kids, Gen Y or Millennials.  While it is alleged that many do not have the motivation, ambition, and persistence of earlier generations, they do have a better ability to adapt, cope, and reason in our technotimes sans superstitions and folklore.  An evolutionary adaptation perhaps?

The BAE Accelerator program is proven to dramatically increase your prospects for angel and VC funding.  It starts with seed capital of up to $10,000 when you’re accepted to show our confidence in your business and commitment in getting you funded.  Then our workshop shares eight weekly sessions with personal coaching to get your business plan and presentation fully investor-ready. Lastly we personally introduce you and go with you to meet Bay Area investors.

If you’re not in the Bay Area, you can participate remotely.  The seed money more than covers the $1,000 workshop fee and your travel expenses to meet investors in Silicon Valley.

Read previous announcements here.

Send your Executive Summary to apply for our program now to me at marc at baeworkshop.com for immediate consideration. The Fall Program is already filling up, so don’t delay!  Registration closes Sept. 30.

Send your Executive Summary now to me at marc at baeworkshop.com for immediate consideration. The Fall Program is already filling up, so don’t delay!

WHY GOOD COMPANIES DON’T GET FUNDED

You know startups face dismal odds of getting funded. One out of ten executive summaries produces an invitation to pitch to a VC. One out of twenty pitches results in an invitation to return. A tiny fraction wind up with the money.

Wait, it gets even worse. Serial entrepreneurs or execs with an extensive investor network typically get funding.  Take them out of the equation and your chances are even more remote.

What’s an entrepreneur to do?

I’ve read and seen over a thousand business plans and pitches and been involved with numerous investors.  Many of them simply are not fundable.  Their business plans and presentations are non-standard and even hard for investors to read.  Some even lack contact info. The startups don’t have a real business model (30% of those pitching to one VC don’t!), they haven’t demonstrated pain or need, the product is incremental and not innovative, their business is not scalable, the product and marketing are not focused, there is no sweat equity, the market is not large enough, there is no team, a believable go-to-market plan is missing, there is no IP or barrier to entry, and so on.  These are just a few of the many pitfalls.

Develop the right business plan and pitch and you CAN separate yourself from the pack to dramatically increase your chance of funding.

BAE Workshop and Investments was founded specifically to do just that. BAE is a 21st Century Accelerator. We provide the education and support that ensures you craft plans and pitches investors want to see. Our process was proven to help 40% of companies get funded.

We invest $5,000 in your startup to prove our belief in your venture and commitment to you.  We’ll introduce you to angels and VCs who invest in your space.