8 Categories of Angel Investors

In today’s competitive business world, there are times when you run out of capital funds. The easiest and most convenient source of funding during such times, are the angel investors. This however doesn’t mean that you accept cash from any angel investor. Choosing the right kind of angel investor is also an important consideration.
While there are several kinds of angel investors, they can widely be categorized as –

Return on Investment (ROI) Angels

One thing about ROI angels is that, they invest only when the market is doing well. This is because; such investors are mainly concerned with the financial rewards they will be able to reap given the high-risk investments they make. For the ROI angels each investment is like another significant addition to their already diversified portfolio.

Corporate Angels

These angels are most often former business executives who have either been replaced from large corporations downsized or taken voluntary retirement. While these investors seem to be making investments only for the sake of profitability, they are actually looking for a paid & secured position in the company they are investing in.

High -Tech Angels

Though these investors are less in experience, the investments made by them in modern technology is quite significant. These investors value profitability as much as they value the exhilaration of introducing a novel technology in the market.

Entrepreneurial Angels

These are successful investors who have their own brilliant businesses, which provide them with a steady flow of income for making high-risk investments in start-up companies. While they make all efforts to help entrepreneurs launch their start-ups, they do not actively get involved in the operations of the company.

Core Angels

These are investors with extensive business experience, who have accumulated enormous amount of wealth over extended period of time. One important fact about these investors is that, they usually tend to make high-risk investments in spite of their losses, which adds-up to their diversified portfolio. Core Angels not just make capital investments but also useful knowledge investments.

Professional Angels

Being professionally employed as lawyers, physicians, etc, these angels make investments into companies of their fields. At times, they may invest in several companies simultaneously. Professional angels are extremely valuable for initial capital investments.

Micromanagement Angels

These are considered to be the most serious types of investors. While most of them are born with a silver spoon, most others acquire their wealth through sheer hardwork. These investors usually seek a board position & tend to implicate the business strategies they have incorporated in their own companies into the companies they are investing in.

[This article has been contributed by www.smegetmoney.com

Investors Like Ideas, But Measure You On EXECUTION

After the idea, it’s all about execution. I often hear from investors that a great idea is necessary, but not sufficient. The most important thing is a proven team, meaning one who has built a startup before, and has experience with the execution process in this domain. 

We’ve talked before about the best personality traits for a good entrepreneur, but have never talked about the importance of process. Yes, even entrepreneurs need to follow a disciplined execution process if they want to maximize their probability for success.

Here is our adaptation of the key steps to ensure a winning execution in any business:

1. Create a vision and instill values -  The vision may be yours alone, but the communication has to include your team, potential investors, and customers. For most people the communication is the hard part – written, verbal, over and over again.
2. Define a focused strategy - Limit the focus to a few critical areas that will yield the highest possible return. If your strategy has more than ten elements, it’s not focused. Not everything can be a priority. Do not spend any time on unimportant goals.
3. Get stakeholder commitment - People who are not committed cannot be held accountable for delivering ambitious results. The guiding coalition must demonstrate 100 percent unity, or there will be a mutiny. The worst case is a silent mutiny.
4. Align the objectives of principals -  I have seen startups implode when principals were pitted against each other on mutually exclusive objectives, like adding more technology versus keeping costs down. Quantify time and cost goals early, get agreement from all, and measure results regularly to verify alignment.
5. Every process needs a system - Define and use well-thought-out systems, manual or automated, to ensure repeatable success of every key process. The most basic element of every startup system is a written, agreed, and measurable business plan.
6. Manage priorities You must relentlessly communicate to all constituents the current priorities, and keep the total to a manageable number. One of the biggest mistakes I see in startups is a new and larger set of priorities every week, causing the team to lose momentum and lose commitment.
7. Provide team support and training - People are your most valuable asset, so start with the right ones, and make sure they have the tools and training to deliver the results you are asking for. Don’t assume they know everything you know, or learn as fast as you do.
8. Assign and orchestrate actions Leaders must make sure all team members are taking the right actions (and behaviors) on a daily basis to deliver long-term performance. Even after all the previous steps, great leaders can’t afford to be merely observers. Lead by action.
9. Measure, adapt and innovate - Things change in a startup, and things will go wrong. You won’t notice if you don’t measure. Measure four or five key drivers, not twenty or thirty things. Motivate everyone with an insatiable curiosity to make things one percent better every day (kaizen).
10. Reward and punish What gets measured and rewarded gets done. Be exceedingly generous with praise, celebration, recognition, small rewards, and sometimes money. Set high standards for performance and use the three T’s (train, transfer, or terminate) to deal with people unable to effectively execute the plan.

We are not suggesting that you task execution will be perfect if you precisely follow these steps. There are far too many pitfalls and risks in a startup to imply they can all be avoided. But if you adopt this blueprint, it’s much less likely that when things get tough, your investors will be thinking of an alternate meaning for the term “Execution.”

Five Leadership Lessons from Steve Jobs !!!!

Whether you’re a “Mac  or PC,” the recent passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs at the age of fifty-six from pancreatic cancer provides a salient moment of reflection for any organizational leader.

Jobs’ legacy and impact on the world is likely to stretch far into the future compared to the brief thirty-five years of his professional career, which took seed in his family’s garage when the idea of Apple was planted with Stephen Wozniak in 1976.

Beyond his cultural and technological contributions, Jobs offers leadership lessons that can be gleaned from his own words. Below are five lessons from his quotes. They provide insight into the Steve Jobs’ “operating system” for life.

1. The Risk Lesson -  “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” The very nature of innovation requires a stark departure from the status quo and deviation from the norm. The best leaders have the vision to understand that fact and the tenacity to lead an organization to that future state despite organizational inertia and resistance.

Jobs did this time and again as evidenced by the introduction of the Macintosh home computer in 1984, his subsequent departure and return to the company, right up to the latest iteration of the iPhone.

2. The Succession Lesson -  “…Some people say, ‘Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.’ And, you know, I think it wouldn’t be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.”

Succession planning is one of the most important roles that senior leadership takes to ensure the long-term viability of an organization. The best companies and leaders strive to achieve this internally by ongoing talent assessment and pushing that planning below the executive level to ensure a funnel full of high potential individuals.

Apple’s current CEO Tim Cook went through a similar grooming process since joining the company in 1998, collaborating with Jobs ever since in preparation to lead.

3. The Mission Lesson -  “Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Many leaders are more inclined to lead with their head or their gut instincts, rather than their heart. Such an emotive mission simply seems too soft and may even be considered a weakness to traditional, hard-nosed leadership sensibilities.

However, Jobs’ illness forced him to live from his passion and creativity, which produced revolutionary product innovations, growth and profits for the organization.

4. The Team Lesson -  “So when a good idea comes, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and—just explore things.”

In virtually every area of life, teams make better decisions than individuals. While Jobs had a reputation of being difficult to work for, he routinely admitted to only hiring senior executives who were competent, smart, and “loved” Apple—so that they would put the interests of the organization ahead of their individual interests.

The company’s success, high employee retention and consistent recognition as one of “best places to work” are proof of his team-centric philosophy.

5. The Perseverance Lesson -  “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

Jobs is often referred to as both a genius and modern-day Thomas Edison. Interestingly, Edison’s driving perseverance is exemplified in his famous quote, “Genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.”

Few would disagree that Jobs embodied Edison’s quote, and perseverance is a requisite skill of all effective leaders.

Not only did Jobs lead an extraordinary company, he led an extraordinary life—and we’re the better for it.

Question:

How has Steve Jobs’ vision and technology impacted you personally or professionally?

You can leave a comment here

SPORTS PERSON TURNING ENTREPRENEUR

While Anil Kumble is an icon and one of the only two bowlers in the history of cricket to have taken all 10 wickets in a test innings, Vasanth Bharadwaj has represented the Indian Table Tennis team at the World Table Tennis Championships in 1987.

Together, these two sportsmen have founded TENVIC, a venture imparting behavioural training programmes based on sports for people development in corporate organisations. Talking about how the idea of launching a venture together came along, the duo shares, "The sporting ecosystem in India is unorganised and we aim at making this more structured, thus helping sports enthusiasts develop skills to excel in their area or sport of interest."

So, was the sports background of any help in the business arena? "Having seen sports up-close as a language that appeals to the entire world, helps us create opportunities for brands to ride this vehicle to reach consumers." share Kumble and Bharadwaj. Kumble further shares how he manages both roles effectively, "My sporting experience and learnings derived from it complement my entrepreneurial abilities aptly - they don't interfere with each other."

Hakimuddin S. Habibulla, Olympian and founder and principal consultant (Sports Performance), Winning Matters Consulting Pvt Ltd, is another sportsperson who transitioned towards entrepreneurship.

He represented India in swimming at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games in the 200m Freestyle, has been the national champion for four consecutive times and won over a hundred medals at various competitions. "It was in 2006, when a couple of schoolmates and I happened to reflect on our sporting careers, which had been compromised at different levels due to a lack of a sporting ecosystem in the country. This led to the start ofGoSports (India) Pvt Ltd, which made microlevel interventions with India's top athletes, to provide the proof-of-concept that Indian athletes had the ability to be amongst the best in the world if they were provided the right support at the right time.

At the end of 2010, the time was right to make macro-level interventions and I co-founded Winning Matters Consulting Pvt Ltd in 2011 to bring the best minds together to work with the key stakeholders of Indian sport - primarily government and industry - towards enabling India's sporting ecosystem," he shares.

Talking about how his sports background helped him carve a niche in the business arena, Habibulla expresses, "I chose to work with my strengths. Athletes are doers who are constantly overcoming different challenges under pressure - personal and environmental.

And these are some of the traits an entrepreneur ought to be equipped with too. Hence, it can easily be stated that sportspersons are naturally gifted with qualities that can help them achieve success in their entrepreneurial journey as well."