HBS Alumni Angels assets for investing in women and minority-led startups

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.

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