Definitely knows what he's talking about. Good answers and good podcast, keep it up.

Sounds like we should talk to John at some point!

When you ask general questions that lump everything into one category, such as university tech transfer, you sound like you are still sticking to your sacred cows that you earlier damned. If you don't identify and kill the sacred cows you are damning, they will always plague you.

John Taylor made investing in life sciences sound funny; saying that large pharmaceutical and life science companies have intentionally cut back on their internal R&D and are looking for entrepreneurs for their next crop of products, claiming that they recognize that entrepreneurs are more effective and more efficient.

I am not sure when to stop laughing about his comment. Does he really expect venture investors to believe that the big companies think they are not as good? It is obvious that they are just passing on the costs. The effectiveness and efficiency for the big companies comes from not having to fund the losing research.

In other words the big companies are saying it is a losing proposition for them, but somehow it becomes a winning proposition when the same thing is done by venture investors. We've seen the poor statistics of venture capital as a whole; but are the exit statistics of any particular sector any better? Could it be that the life science hype bubble just hasn't burst yet? Big companies cutting back on internal research suggests that the stats are not in the investor's favor.

I agree with you about investing in hard times. Getting a good price is not the measure of future success.

Taylor mentioned the need for startups to be able to operate with as few staff as possible. The opportunity I offer only needs one employee to prove the concept so that the big smartphone manufacturers will pick it up.

Isn't it long past time to kill the sacred cow of the fast pitch? Venture investing has been around a lot longer than the fast pitch. The biggest problems we've heard of in the industry have a direct relationship to the fast pitch.

It is very ironic that Angels have become so focused on entire sectors that they think they can hype, instead of focusing on the value of selling a product to an individual user. I guess it is sexier to talk about something bigger than your investment.

The irony is that most Angels have been successful business people where their success was determined by the value they gave an individual customer and now they think as Angels they are adding value to an entire industry, sector, or the economy as a whole. If they are it is just until they reach the end of their runway.

Angels look to invest $25k in venture opportunities. When Angels were running their own businesses, what purchases of $25k and higher did they make based on a fast pitch? What sells of $25k and higher did they make based on a fast pitch?

The higher the sells price the more education is required to make a decision on the transaction. Most high priced items on the market have salesmen that are especially educated about the product and the sales process takes time; such as real estate, medical equipment, pharmaceutical salesmen, engineering equipment and machinery salesmen, construction equipment salesmen, and so on.

Angels have gone from being effective businessmen who educated themselves about their transactions, to taking shortcuts of relying on friends and industry data that is not specific to their investment.

Tom Perkins says that Google did not come to them via a fast pitch. Randy Lunn says by the time you know what questions to ask it is too late to invest. In other words by the time you are able to evaluate based on a fast pitch it is too late to invest. Jim Armstrong says the best investments have been those that took the most amount of time to understand their market.

All of those successful approaches are more time consuming than the fast pitch and they have a narrower focus on the market of the opportunity and don't waste time talking about an entire industry, sector, or economy as a whole. If one is relying on overall market conditions instead of satisfying needs of customers, it is a sure sign of high risk and likely future failure.

If Angels stick to focusing on the needs of the individual customers like they did when they were businessmen, they would bring their business success into their Angel investments. All this talk about hot sectors is a waste of time and an illusion. It has nothing to do with evaluating the likelihood of success of an individual opportunity. It only measures what the success might rise to if it is successful, but not the likelihood of it. The odds of winning are not increased.

If a fast pitch is used to identify the market size of the opportunity, not the industry or sector as a whole, and used to identify what the adoption rate is or likely to be, then it can be used as a starting point of identifying which potential transactions Angels need to educate themselves on before making a decision. Other than that it makes no sense.

The only awards that should be given in any fast pitch competition are:
1. Largest market size.
2. Fastest adoption rate.
3. Fastest potential adoption rate for seed stage opportunities not selling products yet.

Claiming to be able to identify the Best Investment Opportunity based on a fast pitch and resume is ridiculous as TCA's own history shows that they have given that award to an opportunity with no market that lost millions.

The three awards listed above would lead to a different type of presentation, but they would be more meaningful. Some Angels are ridiculously concerned about maintaining entertainment value. Being informative has not hurt the entertainment value of History Channel, Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, and so on.

Awards like Best Presentation/Presenter and Best Investment Opportunity do not help Angels.