Massachusetts Angel Scene–Lessons from Innovation Month, Pt 1

Well, June is Innovation Month in Massachusetts, and I’ve traveled down from Vermont a few times to see what I can learn. I’ll do a separate post on the conceptual brilliance of the MassChallenge (www.masschallenge.org, @masschallenge) competition and why Vermont needs to start something similar ASAP. There are many initiatives of Innovation Month, maybe 50 or more events all packed into one month, to try to create some critical mass. MassChallenge particularly is creating a lot of momentum being created South of the (Vermont) border. Stromatec is one VT company which has been traveling South participating in the MassChallenge to gain contacts and access to specialized expertise in the New England area related to medtech. (Congrats to them, they just landed a Phase II SBIR grant, raising their total non-dilutive grant funding to $2 million!)

But first, it is my “giri”, my sacred duty, to begin by thanking Jason Calacanis, (@Jason on Twitter, the host of This Week in Startups podcast), for setting up Open Angel Forum (#OAF), where tonight was the first roll-out in Boston. We’ll focus the rest of tonight’s post on OAF. While this was not initiated in Massachusetts, but rather by Jason as part of a nationwide, make that global, network, tonight showed both what was great about the Boston ecosystem, as well as what Vermont can learn as it tries to coordinate the pieces of its burgeoning ecosystem.

The event was held at Dogpatch Labs, a Polaris Ventures sponsored incubator (and we have those in VT, such as VCET), with 6 new entrepreneurs (we have those in VT), including 1 traveling down from Montreal (with Burlington being 3.5 hours closer). But then, what a group of angels. While we may have angel investors scattered around Vermont, this was an all-star list of investors any of whom forgot more than I ever knew. Bill Warner (@billwarner) of Avid Technologies, who helped start the Boston chapter of TechStars. You can get a sense of what he means to the Boston startup community by reading his blog (http://billwarner.posterous.com/) which outlines some of the things (like his new Anything Goes incubator) he has been doing to help entrepreneurs. Bill will be taking over some of the organizational duties for future OAF Boston events, probably 3-4 per year, with Joe Caruso (@joecaruso2020) of Bantam Group (www.bantamgroup.com), and John Landry (@leaddog99), both with decades of angel investing experience and enviable investment track records, as far as I can tell.

Several other heads of Boston-based angel groups were there, including Chris Sheehan (@c_sheehan), co-leader of CommonAngels (commonangels.com), IMHO Boston’s premier tech angel group, in whose fund I invest, Jean Hammond (@goldenseeds ?), leader of Golden Seeds Boston and a member of two other angel groups, and Christopher Mirabile (founder of Race Point Capital fund and angel group, and member of Walnut Ventures and Boston Harbor Angels). Plus some VCs that do seed ventures, including Joe Medved of Softbank Capital (http://www.softbank.com/pages/teamx/medved.shtml), Lee Hower (ex Point Judith, now starting a new venture), Tom Egan of Launch Capital (launch-capital.com — his colleague Bill McCullen has helped advise local VT entrepreneurs at UVM’s last I2V conference), and Polaris host Jonathan Lim (polarisventures.com). A few other angels, includling Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh), founder of HubSpot and a prolific angel–who quite literally wrote the book (“Inbound Marketing”), on Social Media. The event was free to the entrepreneurs pitching, free to the angels, courtesy of 2 national sponsors and a local sponsor, unfortunately, all of whom I forget at this late hour, but will add their names in thanks in the comments. And a few others–maybe 16 investors in total, so an intimate group, without press or service providers, that saw brief 5 minute pitches, but then had dinner and a post-pizza gathering to get to know the presenters better, informally.

Unlike many angel events, such as Vermont’s own North Country Angels, these entrepreneurs were mostly pre-revenue. My personal favorites both had a little more traction: Zazuba (based out of Washington DC, looking to gain footholds next in SF and then Boston), and especially KeenKong out of Montreal. Ironically, these two companies weren’t based out of Boston, but both had elements that could partner very well with our Vermont companies. I’m going to try to persuade North Country Angels to invite KeenKong down for another presentation.

It’s interesting to note that there is no shortage of angel groups in Boston–around 20, I think. And not all of the attendees were from Boston–me from Burlington, obviously, but also Lee Hower from Providence, not to mention Jason and company from California. And I think the injection of some outside perspectives led to some interesting comparison points–while everyone knew someone in the room, none of us had been together in that configuration before. And the purpose was, simply, to just put some interesting (non-competitive) entrepreneurs together in a room with a bunch of angels, with only 1/4 of the time together formally scheduled, and see what happens. The closest thing we have to that is the Vermont Venture Network breakfasts, or perhaps Vermont Investors Forum or FreshTracks’ Peak Pitch, but those are much, much bigger networking affairs. This was just a really nice scale, and was a nice change from the normal angel fare.

So: Vermont has many of the pieces, but not the depth of the angel talent pool nor the sheer numbers of companies, universities, and entrepreneurs. The more experienced Boston people tell me that the town lost its way entrepreneurially maybe 10 years ago, and it quickly lost ground while Silicon Valley, NY, Seattle, Austin and Boulder started gaining. But the community put together a blueprint on how to reinvigorate their scene, and Vermonters (especially all those gubernatorial candidates) should take note.

My next post will talk about the MassChallenge, and why it is a success for any company who enters, and we’ll throw in one more post afterwards to talk about the other meet-ups and events done regularly in Boston that can be cloned up here in Vermont.