INVESTORS

On Friday we had Roberto Saint-Malo of Adara Venture Partners speak with us. He was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 1995 and has had extensive experience in direct equity investments.

He covered the Kibo way of investing. He stressed the importance of having a good team and commented that it is best to look for investors that have been through it a few times. During his lecture, he was very clear that he has a major respect for entrepreneurs who can succeed "through imitation” eg. company's like McDonalds or Visa because hey prove that they can take a model and make it even better.
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Their investment Formula
Kibo follows a differentiated investing/involvement approach then most:
1) They act as founders: idea generators/key part of founding initiative
2) They help accelerate: operational support: road-map, financing, productization, sales
3) They have proactive capital efficiency: clear milestones & early exit windows
To me they seem to be supportive yet very focused on results. Which was interesting because during the lecture a classmate asked the question as to weather VC's were really just focused on the exit strategy and they want something that is going to make money fast. Which I find somewhat true in a sense or why else would they do it?
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Kibo Invest’s in 3 Types of ventures
1) Proven Model optimization (Type 1)
2) Early stage investments (Type 2):
3) International opportunistic (Type 3)
The major question in which they always ask is "What is your secret sauce?" What is the magic behind your company.....and you better have one as this is key.
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A question I had for Roberto was that in the article "On the wings of Angels" it stated that before, entrepreneurs could not survive without VC backing but now they are more able to wait on VC backing and instead pick and choose their Angels. I would like to hear Roberto's comment on that statement and weather or not he feels that it is true.
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As a side note, an article in which I found called "Angel vs VC?" (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/angel-vs-vc.html) says that is best to use Angel money when your product is not on the market and thus can not demonstrate real market traction to the investors. He says this because the risk can be syndicated over many angels, angels are more hands off and lastly because it is very hard to sell an idea off a white board to a VC. But it also comments that when faced in a situation where you can choose between an Angel and VC, choose both. Yet again another ambiguous answer. I was wondering your thoughts? I think that it depends because if you have a strong team of people behind you already it may just be a better idea that you take the Angel money and run the business the way in which you envisioned it. However, with both you can benefit from the VC's hand's on approach as well as the Angel's extra funding.