What to do when one retires

Today I was invited to another angel group's meeting... At the Opening Gala of EF I met one of the Trustees, Jim Zug (with roots in Switzerland) who invited me to a LORE meeting... During my preparations for the meeting I discovered that LORE stood for Loosely Organized Retired Executives (must have read it twice to make sure they were not "Retarded") and I was immediately positive about this group... And that didn't change after I found out the meeting was held in a very nice golf club - Green Valley GC...

First thing that stroke me was that I ran into Ed Harvey who I also met at the Robin Hood meeting, and it was him and Jim explaining me that actually angels in Greater Philadelphia area are usually members of several angel groups - they don't see themselves as competition, they just usually operate differently...

Anyway, I again was participating in a standard regular meeting of LORE, listening to their administrative agenda and actually witnessing a change in chairmanship - the new chairman is a guy names Steve Harris who manages Midcoast Capital (they focus on buying secondary interests in VC funds, also interested in foreign funds)... And his job will not be easy... As I learned during the meeting, LORE's key challenge is that most of the members are no longer actively looking for new investors, so they are just monitoring their existing portfolios and like coming to the events - but sometimes even when a viable and interesting opportunity comes in, there is nobody to invest... Well, I still saw several people with appetite - people like Vince Schavione (serial entrepreneur and investor, founder of e-privacy company TurnTide which he sold to Symantec - BTW, it was initially backed by Ben Franklin again) or Ed Harvey who I mentioned at the beginning... But appearantly it is not enough - there was even a discussion about creating two interest groups inside LORE, one for inactive members and the other one for those who still want to make new investments - which I would see as not the best solution (does not sound like too loosely organized)...

But the absolute centerpiece of the meeting was a presentation of a company which I considered to be THE most interesting investment opportunity that I've seen in years - including anything I've seen during my U.S. travels...! And I do believe that we all can still hear a lot about this company...

People start talking about Web 3.0 as the next stage of the web development... And as Web 1.0 was all about just being visible on the Internet, Web 2.0 was about collaboration and user generated content, Web 3.0 has not yet been defined - we just know it will be "even cooler than Web 2.0"... but many people think it will be semantic web - and that is what ListenLogic is about...

ListenLogic was founded some 2 years ago, and Vince Schavione was one of the co-founder and initial investor... They are building technology which will allow anybody to "listen" to what people say about him (his company, brand, product) on the web... It is screening millions of sites, including social networks, twitters, facebooks, blogs, analyzes relevance of the "noise" (on a GoogleRank principle) and provide real-time business intelligence which will be able to help corporations (but also SMEs and startups, politicians and normal people, litterally anybody) to improve whatever they do... Fascinating... Of course, I would have many questions, but for a 15-min presentation, it was the most interesting I've heard in a long time... Let's remember the name, ListenLogic, it may be huge... Probably the only thing they're missing is a cool name like Google, Meebo, Digg or Twitter... I would suggest Blooblaa (and will be happy to take only 1% royalties :-)...