Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Derek Neighbors — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:00:54 +0000

Last week at the Arizona Enterpreneurship Conference (AZEC), a panel from AZ TiE titled “Who Got Funded and Why?” talked for nearly an hour about the dynamics of starting up. Steve Swedler, Chief Product Guy at Gangplank asked finally stood up and asked, “Who Got Funded and Why?”. The moderator turned the question over to a panelist who gave a jumbled answer that barely addressed why, but completely dodged the who?

Out of frustration I made a pretty knee jerk tweet and called this the same old bullshit investors in Phoenix hide behind. As most of the groups haven’t funded anything in 12 months. Later, Anil Jain one of the panelists let me know that they were not aware that was the topic and that was why they never covered it. Fair enough. It still would have been nice to hear which members of TiE had been funded or what the investors involved with TiE were funding.

At Gangplank in the last 18 months we invested in Authority Labs, Simple Seating and Date Designer. Additionally, many of us have put significant resources into 5th Dimension. Integrum has invested significantly for minor equity positions in various local start ups, trading equity for serivces. Additionally, we have launched two products that have been released to others in the community (Glen Garry and Back Tracker).

We currently have budgeted just over a $1 million to invest in the community over the next 5 years. We have been working hard with others to make a home for Funding Universe and Sun Mountain Capital as well. Between the two of them they could represent over $300 million in additional funding for the metro area. More information on this soon.

So you can see why it is frustrating to hear Angel “groups” time and time again ride their high horse about why we (the lowly entrepreneur) should respect them. When in reality the community is finding ways to fund itself. Which in many ways is how it should be. We believe in the community and we are willing to put our money where our mouth is. We hope that these other groups will as well. We wish we could be doing more. Providing capital to entrepreneurs is exactly what this economy needs to rebound.

Note: The are companies receiving angel funding from individuals and there are some angel groups like ATIF that appear to be doing certain types of deals.

Derek Neighbors » vc

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

More from Derek Neighbors

You Might Also Be Interested In