Earlier this year, two dozen former students of mine, their friends and colleagues, formed Golden Angels Advisors. Their goal is to help the next generation of investors grow their expertise in both new ventures and early stage investing.
Over the past fifteen years, while Golden Angels Investors was growing, I was teaching Entrepreneurship in a local MBA program. Many of those 1,000 former students, their friends, colleagues and acquaintances, have kept in touch while they've grown their careers and have often asked about participating in Golden Angels events and meeting entrepreneurs.
Those early and mid career professionals are the beginning of Golden Angels Advisors. Their goal is to acquire experience to help them broaden their horizons. They launched last month at a kickoff event featuring Justin Beck, the CEO ofwww.perblue.com who talked about his experience as a CEO of a venture backed company.
Golden Angels Investors hope to learn from them about their world view, and perhaps to pass along some of the pattern matching experience that we've learned from 15 years of angel investing. So, in addition to planning and running their own events, they've become part of our deal committees and member investment process.
Our membership has always grown each year because we think adding new investors brings a fresh point of view and diversity of experience. Now, this is the next explicit step in that process.
As Rich Meeusen underlined in this article from Sunday's Journal Sentinel, http://www.jsonline.com/business/pass-along-the-torch-of-institutional-knowledge-b99715461z1-377689081.html, passing along the torch of knowledge is a requirement if you're forward-looking.
For Golden Angels, it's a two way street. We hope to be able to help the next generation of investors in an explicit way, but really know we will gain more than we give.
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