Top 10* Reasons TCA Should Move to Angelsoft
Tech Coast Angels has spent the past several months evaluating a conversion from our legacy system to Angelsoft. Here's my take on how things stack up:
11. Keeping it new: Will TCA support Chrome and other new browsers? Or new email applications as they come out? Have we even thought of new IP security improvements for spam? All of this will cost money. We get all of this as part of Angelsoft.
10. David Rose: He founded the New York Angels; he founded Angelsoft. This summer he opened SparkSpace a 15,000 sq ft incubator in NYC.
9. Entrepreneur benefits: A single funding application can be directed to multiple angel groups. Today an entrepreneur must make separate application to TCA and the Pasadena Angels. Tomorrow they'll make one application and send it to multiple groups.
8. The VC connection: Angelsoft has 45 VC's on board already and growing each day. Does TCA want to be on a shared back-end with all the VC's in the US? For referring deals up and down? Maybe not, but all 400 other groups will have a quicker and simpler connection to these VC's (as well as other groups). TCA will be left behind if not on Angelsoft.
7. Is angel investing evolving, changing right before our eyes? The upset of the US economy is having an effect, but will the nature of angel investing change in other ways we can't even imagine today? Very likely and Angelsoft will be a catalyst for this change.
6. Multimedia: This past week I have been capturing video pitches of TCA deals that have signed term sheets and are ready to close. A video pitch offers an opportunity for us to share the deal with other angels around the country and around the world. Every one of the 3 deals participating in this week's video shoot is uploading their video pitch to Angelsoft's OPENdeals. I tried to upload the same video to the TCA site; it failed, "file size exceeds limits".
5. The Wisdom of Crowds: This same world-wide community of users will generate more suggestions for improving Angelsoft than any one group would ever dream of. Just this month, Angelsoft released a new version with over 500 new features and improvements, all for free and available to all their angel groups. The TCA website has been tailored to our needs for the past few years, but its capabilities will never keep up with the capabilities of Angelsoft.
4. Syndication: We join a world-wide community of angel investors and VCs. Angelsoft has over 400 angel groups using their system and a growing number of VCs. Opportunities to syndicate deals among these many groups becomes as easy clicking the mouse to make an administrator in Las Vegas, Pasadena, or Boston aware of an exciting deal here at TCA that's looking to top-off its round.
3. One less volunteer: Today we must solicit the services of a tech savvy member to oversee the TCA website and coordinate with part-time programmers who moonlight on our projects. All the hassles of making and restoring backups, keeping the system up and fully functional will be Angesloft's job.
2. It's Free: Angelsoft has guaranteed we can use their system for free.
1. Costs: We will cut our expenses related to maintaining our own website. True, we'll still have our own website, but all mission critical systems will be on Angelsoft. Our present system will shrink to 10% of its current size. And we're talking real money; just a year ago we spent $45,000 to upgrade our website.
Comments
Interesting perspectives. Sounds like an interesting package. One thing I ran into when doing the same kind of evaluations (as a software development manager and for software-as-a-service for a corporation) you might want to ask:
1. Confidentiality. How much protection/isolation on your deal flow is there, or does the TCA want. Is there some explicit, legal boundaries on where data goes and how it is shared? (and does that matter) -- ie who your members are, what companies are applying, where are they in the deal chain, etc. Investor commentary, etc.
2. Ownership of data. Who owns the data in the database, and is it a "shared pool" of data for all angel groups or just the TCA. Can they republish or give other people data on your deals?
3. Exportability of data. If, for some unforseen reason Angelsoft does not provide what you want, can you export your data back into another system (your own, someone else, etc.) -- in the future?
4. Backup capabilities, offline or online (same issues as a proprietary system, of course). How are they backing up your data, and is there a way for the TCA to back up their own data in case of a catastrophic failure?
5. Source code escrow. If for some reason the software provider disappears (acquired, goes out of business, etc. etc.) is there source code escrow rights so that the TCA's business doesn't halt -- ie you can grab the source/put up a server.
I suspect you know all of this having run a software firm ;-) Some random thoughts, in case they are helpful (ignore them if not).
Posted by: Ben Kuo | September 26, 2008 08:37 PM
Ben,
These are all excellent questions. Here are some answers:
1. Access to all data in Angelsoft is controlled by the group. No member or deal information is ever shared unless the group manager chooses to.
2. Our Privacy Policy makes it absolutely clear that groups own all of their deal and member data. This legal protection is at the core of Angelsoft.
3. We also make it explicit in our Privacy Policy that groups can request an export of their data at anytime. Further, we actually provide reporting tools that let groups export all of their data in an Excel readable format.
4. Our servers are co-located at Rack Space, and we've found them a GREAT facility. They backup our database nightly and put the backup tapes in a vault. Not only that, but we ALSO backup all our document onto Amazon's S3 service. AND just in case these two institution implode, we actually backup our DB nightly to our offices.
5. We don't do source code escrow because it's expensive and not the norm for web-based applications. We have made commitments to our customers though that should Angelsoft expire for any reason, we will give them our code for free.
Ryan Janssen
COO, Angelsoft
Posted by: Ryan Janssen | September 27, 2008 03:06 PM
Adding to number 10:
As the manager of the incubator at Rose Tech Ventures, I can say it's a real pleasure having the Angelsoft team so close to our residents. So while they're benefiting by being closely linked to our incubator, we're benefiting too!
Nate Westheimer
Entrepreneur in Residence
Rose Tech Ventures
Posted by: Nate Westheimer | September 28, 2008 01:12 PM