Calling All Nordic And Baltic Angel Investors
By Ville Vesterinen
There's been a lot of talk lately about angel investing or the lack of thereof, and I think the time is finally ripe for it to raise its head here in the Nordics and Baltics.
I just recently talked to Petteri Koponen of Lifeline Ventures, who came back from the first SeedSummit that took place in London and was put together by the good people at Seedcamp. It's a new initiative that twice a year brings together a critical mass of Europe’s most active seed investors to try and establish a stronger, more cohesive network to support entrepreneurs across the continent.
We welcome the initiative. If its needed generally in Europe, the Nordics and Baltics are literally screaming for such an initiative.
The other angel investor coming from our neck of the woods who was present was who else than the other Jaiku co-founder, Jyri Engeström. Other angels present included Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman, Lukasz Gadowski, Stefan Glaenzer, Dave McClure, Andy Philips, William Reeve, Robin Klein and Sherry Coutu. A hefty list.
Saul Klein, quite rightly, says that we need to make our geographic distribution and cultural diversity part of our strength. He goes onto state that Seedcamp has spent the last few years very focused on building the beginnings of a network model for entrepreneurs and tried to lessen the constraints and isolation of geography by giving people the best possible access to a distributed network of advisors, funding and investors across our region, who can help them aim high and build ambitious global businesses.
This is a great idea, but again everything is in the execution and its not the first time we hear such ambitions. That said, Seedcamp and SeedSummit in particular are well on their way into becoming established pan-European platforms that work. Now, that in mind, I believe we should also recognize our unique cultural strengths here in the Nordics and Baltics in building companies. To start we should build a our own distributed network of advisors, funding and investors across the Arctic region that can then easily further tap into the larger European SeedSummit network of knowledge and capital.
To our surprise, we have heard some local players and institutions being protective of their 'lists' of angel investors to the extent that they don't want to share them with fellow investors. That needs to change! It needs to change since this is an effort where everybody wins: The entrepreneurs, the investors and the economy.
To take the first baby step and do what we can do, we have included a new category into ArcticIndex: Angels. This falls under the category of Investors, which list both venture capital funds as well as angel investors. To get listed there all you need to do is create a personal profile in ArcticIndex and tick a box that says 'Angel investor'. ArcticIndex is a free wikistyle directory of entrepreneurs, startups and investors for everybody in region to benefit from.
It is beneficial for the entrepreneurs and angel investors to find each other, resulting in better and more quality deal flow for angels and better term sheet for entrepreneurs. Not only that, it is also valuable for the investors to know each other, especially in the seed stage where pooling of investments is not only useful, but many times a requirement to make a meaningful impact. Similarly it is useful for angels to share knowledge on best practices on for example how early and later stage investors can work together. Seedcamp has started something great that makes the region potentially better for all of us. Let's do our part and make it work for all of us.
If there is something you'd like to see added to the ArcticIndex to make it work better for serving the above purpose, please don't hesitate to comment or shoot us a mail.
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Welcome consultants! You may now list yourself as angels for free and entrepreneurs suspecting no evil are at the mercy of yours =)
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Don't worry Olli. We keep eye on the list and moderate where needed.
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Great initiative, Ville & Co!
There are a few other small, concrete steps that can be taken to reduce friction from the angel investment process, one of them being publishing standard angel/seed round legal docs, as Y Combinator and a few others have done in the US. Seedsummit plans to publish UK versions on January, and we've proposed creating Finnish ones based on those. (Tekes/Vigo and quite a few private parties seem interested in this.)
I fully agree with the article Nick referred to: angel investors are becoming an increasingly critical component in the startup ecosystem. In the short-term this isn't good news for Nordic and Baltic startups due to the relatively low number of active local* angels in many key categories such as consumer Internet. Due to this, it is vital that both public and private sectors do whatever they can to improve the local angel investment environment.
*) Angel investing is much more local than VC investing.
Well,
I only speak now about Finland and not Baltics or Nordics overall.
I naturally agree that angel investors are becoming more and more important, even though we have public investors to fill the gap - or at least to help in some growth stages of the companies. And yes, the initiative is a beautiful thought and of course all kind of activation is generally good for the ecosystem. Thus, I wish that you can control the thin red line between types of consultants and investors which many seed companies are not aware of.
Still I feel - with my relatively small experience - that the biggest concern here is the lack of international investments which ought to come along especially in the C- and D-stages to allow the companies to have a chance for an IPO. When was the last time in Finland a tech company had an initial public offering?
Many entrepreneurs choose to sell their companies at early stages rather than continue to develop it to the next stages, and naturally we can't blame them for doing that since we can't know most important details behind such actions. However, just to give one example, Nokia was almost sold to Ericsson at some point because things didn't seem that good ahead. Where would have that taken us now?
Olli,
Am sure there's a need across the board. To make this tangible for those not as well versed, which companies do you see needing C- and D-rounds and not being able to attract the investments to allow the companies to have a chance for an IPO?
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