Bicycling with Inland Empire angel investor John Tillquist the day after Thanksgiving, see route, I asked him what issues he'll bring to the Tech Coast Angels' offsite planning meeting this week. Usually a better listener, let me confess I can't remember more of John's marketing concepts, but it did trigger a mad scribble on my part.

Let's take deal flow. Angel groups in smaller metropolitan areas, like the Desert Angels in Tucson and First Angel Network in Halifax, Nova Scotia see modest deal flow compared with the "drinking from a fire hose" mode, the hundreds of funding applications seen in LA, Seattle, Boston and New York City. There's a different approach in a smaller city with a smaller funnel. When a good deal comes along it's treated accordingly, lots of time can be spent grooming the entrepreneur and polishing the PowerPoints if you only meet quarterly. This more modest deal flow has its advantages: at the less frequent screening meetings these more polished deals may get a warmer reception, something that both the entrepreneur and the angels will appreciate.

In a major urban area like Orange County, CA, there's so many deals coming in through the web that sorting through them takes all the time the admin staff has before the startup finds itself in front of the angels at our biweekly screening meetings. As you can imagine, no one's had time to groom the entrepreneur or even look at his slides, so when he bombs out it can often be heard that "we're not seeing many good deals"; likewise the entrepreneur walks away feeling burned.

I propose we learn something from our small town peers, let's whittle down the funnel and only consider the very best deals we see in Southern California. If we only met once a month we could spend more time with the entrepreneurs and help them polish their pitch. We'd get a twofold return even before we fund them: our members would like what they see and the entrepreneurs would feel like we contributed to their eventual success. We won't fund this year, or probably next either, as many deals as we have in the boom years past, so why not trim the intake valves accordingly?