My friend Marianne Hudson, who runs the Angel Capital Education Foundation for the Kauffman Foundation
has released a new study saying that angels are getting an average IRR of 27% on their investments. The study consisted of 86 organized angel groups and 539 individual angels. These angela averaged 2.6x on their money over 3.5 years. Damn, that's good. I never have figured out my own IRR, because I've been in some companies for ten years before I see an exit, and in other situations I simply take convertible debt and choose not to stay in the investment when I can get my debt repaid.
And anyway, I don't really angel invest by the numbers; I do it for passion and I go by intuition.
Well, that's a lie. I've been angel investing for thirty years, and by now it's less intuition than experience. But it still isn't strictly by the numbers. I want to invest in technology that will "change the world," or at least the space in which it competes, and will give an entrepreneur a start on a path. For that reason, I keep the amount of investment small. If I lose it, I don't die. And I keep it specific. Money for the patent attorney. Money for the trips to Silicon Valley to pitch the big guys. Money to keep the servers up.
This is often the hardest money for an entrepreneur to come by.
A friend of mine who is passionate about how women are treated by the health care system has capped off about five years of health care advocacy by launching a site where women can go to find good information, forums, audio and video clips of physicians explaining common conditions that affect women, and share stories. Michelle had a hysterectomy (probably unnecessary in retrospect) that plunged her into a hormone-related depression and forced her to become a more knowledgeable consumer of health care. Once she recovered, she turned her anger at the system into a business.
The site is called EmpowHer.com and it released its beta this week, already loaded with podcasts and videos by the country's foremost physicians. But it won't be anything unless women actually get on it and share their stories, building up that second store of information -- the patient's point of view.
I'm an advisor to the company because I believe there can't be too much unbiased information available, and the best way to get it is through user-generated content. Three types of users will generate content: providers, patients, and health educators.
Not in the beta, but coming soon, is a large database of free or low-cost health-related events -- held by hospitals, by the Red Cross, by all the disease-releated nonprofits who are constantly offering information but can't get it out to the people who need it.
EmpowHer needs help from its users to be all that it can be. If you are a woman, go join it and make a contribution of your own health care story.
I've been working with Earth911, which is morphing itself from a call-in line for recycling sites ( 1-800-CLEANUP) to a web-based resource on product stewardship,. It was started by a friend of mine as a nonprofit. He died, it went bankrupt, and was bought by some investor friends of mine who are turning it into a media resource for recycling. Historically, all government entities have participated with the locations of their recycling sites and what each accepts. This has created a very valuable searchable database for people who wish to drop off junk.trash/recyclables.
We're right in the middle of the turnaround, but the first thing we did was rebuild the site on Wordpress, so we can have user-generated content. We're looking for contributors to the part of the site that deals with product stewardship for small business, which will launch in late February (soft) and on Earth Day (real).
If you want to write articles on product stewarshipm Earth911 wants to hear from you.
