CTEK Angels Live 2007

Time once again for the annual CTEK Angels Live! event, where the public is invited to observe entrepreneurs pitch and field questions from a panel of angel investors. And, most importantly, listen in on comments and criticisms from the angels after the entrepreneurs have left the room. For anyone involved in pitching to investors, this is an invaluable learning experience. This is the second year for this event and it appears popular enough to make it a regular event.

Three companies presented yesterday, all software based although quite different in their business models:

Myplacemat.com is a travel site specifically for frequent flyers. They aim to become the "amazon for travel" aggregating many travel related products in one site. They offer a frequent flyer points management system where a traveler can view the balances from all of their rewards programs in one display. Myplacemat intends to gather information on this valuable target market of frequent fliers and sell it to the travel industry.

Next up was Villij a recent graduate of TechStars and a cutting edge Web 2.0 company. Although the Web 2.0 community is alive and well in Boulder, this company is a bit of a stretch for CTEK. Villij is building a recommendation engine, they feel that the current state of art search, ala Google, will be replaced by a technology that leverages information on the individual performing the search to provide more targeted search results.

Last but not least was AWhere a business version of Google maps. The pitch was made by AWhere's president, and former director of CTEK's Boulder Venture Center, Jim Pollock. AWhere's technology combines a geographical information system with a company's business intelligence to present results on maps so that information can be quickly interpreted. The product is a desktop application sold to enterprises.

CTEK Angels is an angel investor network, pooling their resources to improve deal flow and screening, but each investor acts on their own. Each investor has his or her own criteria for investing based on their business background and comfort zone. This leads to some pretty lively discussions after the pitches where investors will express wildly divergent perceptions of the presenting companies.

CTEK Angels Live

I attended the first open session of the CTEK Angels last Wednesday. For those of you who may not be familiar with CTEK (Capital, Technology Transfer, Entrepreneurship, Knowledge), it is an independent Colorado, non-profit group that assists entrepreneurs with the expertise, resources and capital sources they need to grow their companies to the next level. CTEK Angels are the investors associated with CTEK; a loosely associated group of independent investors that meet once a month to give entrepreneurs an opportunity to make a pitch and combine their experience to evaluate the pitches. Although the Angels evaluate the presentations made by the entrepreneurs, investment decisions are left up to the individual investors.

CTEK provides a very effective way for entrepreneurs to approach angel investors, a very elusive group for the most part, but nevertheless instrumental in funding a major portion of small businesses in this country. Although the CTEK Angels meet once a month, this was the very first time the meeting was opened to the public. And despite the first snow of the season and the difficult parking situation at the University of Denver (no valet parking for the angels!) the event was a sell out. I guess everyone wanted to see the entrepreneurs thrown to the lions.

Chatting with some people in the audience I met both would-be entrepreneurs and investors; the entrepreneurs were curious about the process and the investors... looking for deals the Angels pass on? This event went a long way to expose the process and perhaps reduce the intimidation and confusion factor. CTEK may be seeing an increase in the number of applications for their funding program as a result.

The presentations by the entrepreneurs were well done and demonstrated the coaching they received by CTEK advisors in preparation. We heard from Ashif Dhanani from X Inc., Michael Sitarzewski of Hypersites and Magic Home. All of these companies are selling products and generating revenues and are looking for revenue for marketing and business development to get them to that next level. We'll be watching for them in the coming year.