Last day has come...

... with the very last two meetings in my program, except for the next week's closing seminar in Philadelphia and group meeting with Tom Beach... It felt strange when I got up and dressed for meetings for the last time... But let's not get too sentimental here...

The first meeting was in Vienna, VA and I met with John May... John is a Principal at New Vantage Group, but also chair-emeritus of the Angel Capital Association, co-chair of the newly established World Business Angels Association... John is also the author of two books on angel investing (he gave me a signature copy of the second and I just bought the first via my Kindle), and through New Vantage Group he is also Managing Partner of UK-based early stage VC fund Seraphim... So there was A LOT to talk about...

John is big enthusiast of non-institutional early stage financing of startups, he has been studying and involved in many angel groups, he has managed angel groups, he's looked at different forms of angel investing, including pooled angel funds, broker models and others, in the U.S. as well as in Europe (mainly the U.K.)... Therefore he is definitely a person to listen to...

What surprised me (although it's rather anecdotical) was how the word angel evolved for somebody investing in businesses - it was in Broadway, where there were many ambitious writers and musicians who had those great ideas but no money... And all they needed was somebody who would trust them, wanted to see his name up in glittering shiny letters as a producer and paid for putting up the show... There were pretty much three possibilities of a result: it was either a disaster with all $ down the drain, or it did OK with $ returned but no profits, or it was a hit with $$$ back to the investor together with recognition as the wise men who saw the genius of Hello Dolly or Producers... And that's where the term ANGEL was first used... Fascinating...

But back to reality, what John said was necessary in order to put together a functioning angel network (group, fund, band) which could be sustainable in long term are three things:

• active angels
• investable deals
• charismatic leadership

If one of those things is missing, we get an inactive environment like Montana, Brazil, and ... Czech Republic... Therefore, John very much encouraged me to go ahead with the idea of Credo Ventures - as his vies is that the Czech market is some 10 years behind the U.S. in terms of activity of angels... We are in the "call me when you'll have a deal" phase, which I had to confirm fully... So once again, a lot of encouragement and actually an offer: John asked me to keep him in the loop on the development and expressed his interest in assistance and maybe cooperation...

What I almost forgot to describe is Seraphim... As mentioned, it's a UK-based fund which was put together by John and his UK partner Anthony Clarke (chairman of EBAN, Board Director of GLE Capital and chairman of London Business Angels) and they bid to the UK government for funding which they got - so Ł 10m was invested by a consortium of angel networks and corporate venturers and the remaining Ł 20m comes from low cost government loans... The deal between Seraphim and the UK government is a very interesting, and if I ever changed my mind and went for public funding, I would definitely try to do something similar... Another interesting thing for me was to learn about corporate governance of the fund - as it is a very unusual one... They have a consensus model for the 4 Investment Directors (Partners) and 75% affirmative vote necessary from the 9 partners (LPs)... How similar to our thinking at Credo... :-)

The time flew really quickly, so it was time to go back to D.C. to my very last meeting - so John drive me back to Metro and off I went... But I strongly believe I established a very interesting contact with John and New Vantage Group, and strongly believe there will be some cooperation in the future... Also, John recommended to me a Croatian gentleman currently looking around for a new challenge in VC / early stage capital (Sam Sezak)... And finally, we found out we had a common friend, Dusan Stojanovic - who is probably also raising a new fund as well, so I have to get back in touch with him...

Finally, I met with Frederick Provorny (Russian, not Czech name), founder and president of the Center for New Technology Enterprise - an independant nonprofit organization providing web-based trans-disciplinary education and consulting... The discussion was interesting, I sort of used professor Povorny to debrief at the end of the fellowship, but he had some very interesting comments... And at the end we agreed to stay in touch - and I promised to include professor Provorny's Center into my discussions and pitches to Czech universities... And I will definitely go through the web site and read articles, to understand a bit more how the Center works...