Harvard Business School is featuring an article about the Venture Capital Access Program on the website of the U.S. Competitiveness project.
In the article, I discuss why we think that smart early-stage investors should target women and diverse entrepreneurs, and why we think HBS Alumni Angels in particular is well positioned to be very successful.
While there have been a number of past efforts to target women and minority entrepreneurs, it’s hard to point to a financially successful VC with this strategy. Angel networks in general have lots of disadvantages compared with VC funds, but VCAP© has three key advantages:
• Bigger reach, because there are more “Partners” than any normal VC fund. HBS Alumni Angels of NY has many Members (including me) who are institutional venture capitalists.
• High quality. NAIC‘s involvement in VCAP© insures that a robust pipeline of diverse entrepreneurs will participate. Since 1970, NAIC Member firms who focus on private equity and venture have invested in and transformed more than 20,000 companies.
• More precise matching of investors/board members with companies. Data from the Kauffman Foundation shows that angel investors get better returns when they invest in domains they know and/or when they get substantively involved in the companies. Because of our large network, we can identify angels who have very specific industry background pertinent to a given company, and solicit them to join a given syndicate.