Rise of the tech angels
In recent conversations over the last few weeks about investment activity here in Southern California, I’m finding more and more entrepreneurs are looking to technology angels — that is, high profile folks from the technology industry with recent exits — rather than venture capitalists. In particular, in the consumer Internet and web space, the capital requirements that these entrepreneurs think they have — usually, in the $250K to $500K range — are fairly modest, versus traditional larger VC investments.
Although there are a number of very high profile, non-Southern California “super angels” that it seems everyone I talk to wants to get to — Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Ron Conway, Marc Cuban, and Elon Musk (plus, about everyone else from Paypal) come up in my conversations with entrepreneurs all the time — it seems Southern California individual angels get less attention. However, there seem to be a few people here — Michael Jones of Userplane/AOL comes to mind, as do Matt Coffin of LowerMyBills.com, Richard Wolpert of Realnetworks/Disney Online (now a VC), and Kamran Pourzanjani of PriceGrabber — who entrepreneurs are adding to their list as “go to” angels. It will be interesting to see how the trend towards looking to these “super angels” first goes here in Southern California.
