ACA MembersMonday, October 09, 2017 By: Sarah Dickey, ACA Membership Director One of my favorite parts of working with ACA members is attending the Regional and Special Interest Meetings where angels gather to learn about investing trends and encourage collaborative investing. ACA Regional Meetings connect new and experienced angels to each other for investor education, networking, and to syndicate angel deals in real-time. There is no substitute to the momentum that can be created by having angel investors in the same room debating smart investing practices and sharing investment opportunities. And sometimes, angels themselves become the innovators for getting deals done. Such is the case of the recent ACA Midwest Regional: Best of the Midwest – planned and hosted by Nebraska Angels in Omaha last week. Held in a turn of the century warehouse turned community art and innovation center – Kaneko – the meeting began with a view of the Nebraska Angels history after turning near collapse in 2008 to a thriving group of nearly 70 investors with a Midwest-wide syndication portfolio – and recent exits. In her welcome Laura Classen, Executive Director of Nebraska Angels, encouraged the attendees to use the meeting to make networking among fellow investors and syndication a priority in order to support the innovative companies, create strong investment portfolios and overcome geographical barriers. Tags: Monday, July 17, 2017 By: Marianne Hudson, ACA Executive Director Although ACA itself is only eleven years old, several of our current member angel groups trace their beginnings back much further than that. A total of nine groups have now been in existence for 20 years or more. Here is that honor roll and the founding year for each. Congratulations to all!
The latest to achieve that impressive 20-year mark is Sierra Angels of Incline Village, Nevada, the angel group from which our new Board Chair, Linda Smith, hails. I was honored to attend the group’s anniversary party yesterday, along with ACA Board members Jim Connor and Kevin Learned. We look forward to helping more interested member groups celebrate their 20th anniversaries and thank all of you for supporting new companies that create jobs and innovation. Tags: Thursday, June 29, 2017 By Graeme Thickins, ACA PR Team Did you ever wish you’d have had a chance to meet or chat with someone at the ACA Summit or any of our other events, but never had the opportunity to run into them? Well, now you can — via brief interviews posted on the new ACA video library. It’s your chance to get to know interesting people, with great insights, better. The full set of ACA videos are posted on our Vimeo channel. You can view these videos without a Vimeo account, or you can create a free account, and then follow any channels of your choice — which we suggest you do with the ACA channel, of course! If you do that, then you’ll be notified whenever there’s a new video posted on our channel. Friday, June 02, 2017 By: Marianne Hudson, ACA Executive Director I have the privilege of working with one of the hardest working boards of directors on the planet at the Angel Capital Association. Members and friends may not realize how much time, effort and wisdom 18 people put into our association, but I see it every day in our programming, resources, financial planning, and much more. ACA members should be aware of two important things that have happened in the last month with the ACA Board: Tags: Friday, May 12, 2017 By Graeme Thickins, ACA PR Team Following on from Part 1 of our recap on the 2017 ACA Summit in San Francisco, we have more great insights to pass along from the event. The following is a summary of notes gathered by members of another angel group that attended the event. Summit Insights from Victoria Barnard and Aviva Ajmera, Women’s Capital Connection Tags: Summit Friday, May 12, 2017 By Graeme Thickins, ACA PR Team More than 650 angel investors came together for a very full three days of learning and networking at the 2017 ACA Summit in San Francisco April 26-28. Attendees represented 42 American states, 5 Canadian provinces, 18 countries, and more than 36% were women – a new record for the annual ACA event. It would take a book to fully recap the entire event, but here are some notes and quotes that will give you a taste of what transpired. Tags: Summit Wednesday, April 19, 2017 Anna deTiege, ACA Membership Consultant The Angel Capital Association is pleased to announce the three finalists for the 2017 Luis Villalobos Award, a national award recognizing ingenuity, creativity, and innovation among startups: DesignMedix, Magnetic Insight, and Peloton Technology. These were among many companies nominated by ACA’s membership of angel investors. The three finalist companies will be honored and the winner announced April 27 at the 2017 ACA Summit in San Francisco. The award is named in memory of Luis Villalobos, whom angel investors admired nationwide for his active investing and mentoring truly innovative companies. Tags: Summit Thursday, March 16, 2017 By: Marianne Hudson, ACA Executive Director The Angel Capital Association has some wonderful member angels and organizations and I’m glad so many of them actively share their knowledge and deals with other ACA members. If you haven’t taken a tour of media coverage of ACA members this year, it is worth your time. About 60 media stories about ACA members were published in the first ten weeks of 2017, and here are a few of my favorites: Tags: Exits Monday, February 20, 2017 By: Marianne Hudson, ACA Executive Director Three ACA member organizations have really put on their hiking boots with excellent adventures and exits in late 2016. On top of some really great investor returns, they also include a couple of important social returns that I really like. Let me tell you about them: Wednesday, December 28, 2016 I have to admit that while I have really enjoyed being an angel investor and meeting such interesting people, but the real fun didn’t start until I had an exit. I was lucky enough to be one of 40+ investors in EyeVerify, which was acquired in September by Ant Financial, a subsidiary of Alibaba for more than $100 million. There’s nothing like getting that return check – or hearing the ins and outs of the acquisition from the entrepreneur and angels on the board! This made me wonder how many other ACA members also had this kind of fun. In a quick bit of website research, I found an incomplete list of acquisitions and IPOs for portfolio companies of ACA members in 2016 below. These ACA members are from throughout North America, not just the usual venture hotspots. I don’t know how many angels were involved in these exits, but congrats to them and the entrepreneurs who led those companies. |