Tonight is the night – Dragon's Den Season 2 – Episode #1

If you have been wondering what it is like to be breathed on by a hot, fiery, and scaly creature, you can tune in tonight to see the ulta-hyped Dragon’s Den Season 2 on CBC.

This season, like the last, will see Sean Wise manning the blogosphere with all sorts of interesting extras. Without a doubt, I think they need to make Sean the TV host. I suspect that the reason he isn’t the host is a silly one, but I won’t speculate here.

We have made our opinions about the Dragon’s Den known before, so we don’t need to rehash those.

Tune in and feel free to comment back here on what you think. I’d love to hear some opinions.

Angel Investing – New Series

I’d like to welcome Craig Hayashi, of Maple Leaf Angels, to StartupNorth. The following post is the first article of a new StartupNorth series on angel financing Craig will be writing. We’re excited to have Craig on board and look forward to learning from his experiences as a Canadian angel investor. — Jonas

Angel financing is an important part of a startup’s lifecycle, I’d like to help as much as I can to demystify the process. I am one of the founders of the Maple Leaf Angels one of the main organized angel groups in the Toronto area. As such, most of my articles will be written from the viewpoint of securing funding through an angel group.

So what is an angel group? Basically it is an organization that has angel investors as members and provides the infrastructure to intake companies looking for funding, screen them, and provide them a forum to pitch to the members of the group. The benefit to companies looking for funding is that it provides a defined place & process by which to submit a funding application that can reach many angel investors. The benefit to angel investors is that it provides a forum to see quality deals and pool together investor’s capital for deals. From a funding standpoint, the important thing to remember is that the group only exists to support the investment. At the end of the day, each individual angel investor is deciding if they want to invest and they individually write a cheque for how much they want to invest.

To help frame the overview with some actual figures, here are some statistics from the Angel Capital Association. The Angel Capital Association is an alliance of angel groups in North America and periodically surveys the groups to understand investment trends.

Average # of members in an angel group: 44

Average # of investments per year: 7

Average size of each investment: $241,000 USD

Average investment size per angel: $30,000 USD

The statistics above are fairly representative of the angel groups I have been involved with in Toronto. Which basically means that for a given financing deal, you can expect to be able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars spread across a dozen or so investors.

In future articles, I plan to cover various aspects of the angel financing process such as what makes a good investor presentation, what angel investors look for in making a financing decision, term sheets, valuation, etc. I welcome suggestions of topics you would like to hear about and if you have any questions in general about angel financing, feel free to contact me: craig <at> mapleleafangels.com

What happens when it all goes wrong?

I have been meeting with a decent number of startups in and around Toronto lately. I have been doing this for a few reasons. The most obvious is that I want to find interesting startups to profile here on StartupNorth, I want to encourage people to keep at it, and more selfishly, I find startups, whether they are my own or someone else’s, fascinating.

When I came across this chronicle of the ArsDigita story, I was fascinated. Philip Greenspun went through it all. An incredible ramp up of his business, strong response from customers and a solid development team that was producing really great products.

If you remember Ars back then, they were a big deal. The Ars Community System was the top notch social media platform of it’s day, and a lot of companies are just now starting to replicate it, including a few Candian startups. (Whether or not they know they are simply replicating Ars is another story).

You will have to read the story for yourself. Take what lessons you can from it, it is the story of what happens when investors don’t play nicely. ArsDigita was a strong company, profitable and reasonably well run, but it only took a few petty VCs to tank the whole thing.

If that can happen to Ars, what could happen to your little startup if you took money from the wrong source?

Read On »