The '10 exits' is very good. Opens my eyes on what else the investor looks at.

Your doing a great job and service for the Angels with your interviews - keep it up.

great interview, worth listening all the way through!

just a thought... you may want to use a software like ibm viavoice or other speech to text converter so transcripts could be more readily available. it would also help for seo (search engine optimization).

- jason nadaf

I met Frank Peters last night. He was one of the guys that gave a lot of analysis without asking any questions.

Interesting show.. Did you ever consider coupling dividends to the CEO salary and other company success indicators? Such a framework would help align interests, preempt some of the undesirable outcomes to investors, and likely be more pallatable to entrepreneurs compared to the win-lose that your guest was proposing. The core problem seems to be the heavy focus on a large exit in 5 years, an arbitrary yard stick that is much less achievable (and predictable..) than gradual and sustainable growth.

Thanks for telling us about the book by Alex Wilmerding. I have found that they are also available as e-books from several vendors.

Thanks Mr. John Huston for your explanation on what is important to Angel Investors in order of priority.

For me this latest interview of John Huston has been the most insightful of all the Frank Peters shows in helping the Entrepreneur understand Angels and the venture industry.

In other shows we have heard it said that Angels don't do this just for the money. When John says he does it to help Ohio, and then goes on to talk about the risks of being sued, losing connections, and loss of reputation, it really spells out just how much helping Ohio means to him.

After all, an Angel typically already has enough money to live comfortably so there is no need to risk one's reputation. It'ss not like you can gain your reputation and connections back in the next investment. Burnt bridges tend to stay burnt.

Now that I understand that Angels are taking those kinds of risks, the fact that Angels do things like look for entertainment value in the way they run their organization makes more sense to me. But I still think they should call a spade a spade. I don't think they should hold themselves out be something they are not or portray an event as something it is not.

Such as when they pretend to know a good thing just from a fast pitch, even though several who have been on the Frank Peters show say you can't; or when a fast pitch contest claims to identify the "best investment opportunity" when it never has in the past and is not run in a manner that can. It would be more honest to just name the contest after the judges and say the winners are So and So's picks.

Not calling a spade a spade has hurt Angels, evidenced by their complaints about the lack of returns over the past ten years, and it hurts people trying to learn from Angels and VCs such as what we heard on the show featuring Budding Brilliance.

I believe Angels should have their entertainment, but I also believe it should not be in the form of hype. Too many people on both sides of the venture industry have gotten hurt over the years because of all the hype.

To make the TCA contests more entertaining, why not put the judges on the line as well as the entrepreneur? Judges could state their picks and time will tell how well they judged, much like the way people play fantasy sports league. Every TCA member could play. They could each come out with their top-ten, and as time goes by they could see who picked the highest number of winners. The winning entrepreneur could be determined by placing the highest on the top-ten lists of the most TCA members.

The contest held in a given year could also feature the picks from previous years and which judges have picks that are still in business and or have given good returns.

Currently the contests are run in a way that past VC guests on the Frank Peters Show say cannot possibly identify "best investment opportunity" as the contests claim to do. So why claim to be doing it?