I was fortunate to be invited to the dinner meeting of a local angel group recently. I've been to many of these as an attendee and presenter. Anyone who has ever been in the early-stage ecosystem knows the setup: a collection of experienced tech execs huddled in a dark banquet room, staring up at a screen where a budding entrepreneur is giving the pitch of their life, hoping to raise sufficient capital to launch their business.
Over the years new venues for raising capital have emerged, largely digital, which have sought to replace the angel dinner. The ability to scale, the democratization of capital, and overcoming regional biases all were and still are good reasons to support the growth of alternative platforms for raising capital. Personally, I've been highly supportive of these; like democracy, I believe that more people having access to a system can only improve the health of a system.
However, in attending the traditional angel dinner, I saw something I'd almost forgotten about with the "old school" way of raising capital: the collaborative energy and collective experience of the people IN the room, all looking at the same company, at the same time. In contrast to the online syndication of capital raising, which is rather diffuse, the angel dinner concentrates the expertise and attention at a focal point in time and space.
If you think of it like integral calculus, the online way of raising capital enables the company to assemble "slices" of capital and expertise over time intervals.
In contrast, the angel dinner adds all of the "slices" into a whole (like the integral function) and consolidates them simultaneously in one meeting.
For the entrepreneur, that can be invaluable, not only for efficiently concentrating and collecting investment capital but also for tapping into the collective knowledge of a group, many of whom are former entrepreneurs themselves.
And that, in my estimation, is why the angel dinner will never die. There is no substitute for the physical convening of people to raise risk capital.
Advice to entrepreneurs: Go out there and "break bread to make bread".
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