Angels and Demons: The Benefits and Pitfalls of Angel Finance

Seed Academy returns on 29 October to complete our series of events on start-up finance with our latest Q&A session, ‘Angels and Demons: The Benefits and Pitfalls of Angel Finance’ - A tell all on Angel finance with some excellent and experienced panellists. As usual, we will be in the big events room on the ground floor of Google Campus on 29 October 2013, with a prompt kick off at 7:00pm.

Headliners

We are pleased to confirm, and are very fortunate to have, Alexander Sleigh, Howard Graham, Bill Morrow, Bryan Crotaz and Adrian Black (five very well known personalities in the Angel investment community) as confirmed panellists:

Alexander Sleigh is the commercial manager for Angel Capital Group which includes the LBA network. Alexander plays a key role in the sourcing and assessment of investment opportunities. He then works closely with the selected entrepreneurs in preparation for each Company Presentation Event, and beyond as they look to secure funding. Further responsibilities include management of investor relations, communications, marketing, events and administration for the whole of ACG.

Howard Graham is a successful entrepreneur, founder of The Made Simple Group and finalist of Business Person of the Year 2007: Howard is actively involved in the local business community - being a founding member of Clerkenwell BNI and a regular speaker at business events, having regularly appeared on the "Midas Touch" panel at the Business Start up Show with "Dragons" Peter Jones and Rachel Elnaugh. Graham also readily shares his experiences with start-up businesses.

Bill Morrow: Serial entrepreneur, Bill Morrow, has been creating, building and selling businesses for the last 25 years. He is Founder and Chief Executive of Angels Den, The World’s first integrated Angel and Crowdfunding platform, operating at the very heart of entrepreneurship to bring business Investors and Entrepreneurs together.

Bill started his working life as an accountant with Virgin and moved into investment banking in the City of London. He set up an international financial services company Morgan Chase, which he sold to a Wall Street Bank in 2001. Since then he has been making his own investments.

Bryan Crotaz of digital media company, Silver Curve invented and brought to market the Inspired Signage digital signage solution, the system behind AV installations at major sites including Lord's Cricket Ground, St Pancras International Station and Heathrow Terminal 5. In the initial stages of launching Silver Curve, Bryan raised finance both from angels and from the crowd.

Bryan has used his 15 years of experience building graphics engines for signage to become the driving force behind the creation of Aperture, Silver Curve's new graphics engine.

Adrian Black is the sole founder of Contego Fraud Solutions who offer a cloud-based risk scoring and due diligence solution with access to a huge array of aggregated data on people and companies.

Adrian raised seed investment from angels to complete and launch the Contego system and after securing their first FTSE250 client, Contego have just completed another angel investment round to provide growth capital.

Format

Like our previous events, we'll follow the same 'BBC Question Time' format with the focus being on Angel investment and the benefits and pitfalls of the same. We want the forum to be as lively as possible with a high level of audience participation so please feel free to let us know before the event of any particular questions you'd like to put to the panel.

Some of the areas we'll be looking to investigate are as follows:

How much equity is it wise to give away when acquiring angel finance? What are the best ways to meet angel investors? How involved can angel investors become with a start up business? What should companies be able to demonstrate in order to attract the best investment? At what stage of a business’ evolution is angel finance appropriate and what are the other options?

We will start at 6.30pm with some general networking on the ground floor before holding our formal 'Question Time' forum between 7 and 8.00/8.15pm, followed by more networking at Campus (we have to be out by 9pm) and then the pub! As usual, there will be plenty of beer and food available!

Payment

A small £10 charge, either paid before through meetup.com or payable on the door, will be levied to cover the cost of the event and some light refreshments!

We really hope you can join us!

Please RSVP online at: https://www.meetup.com/seedacademy/

You can also find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/moneygrowsonseeds

Event Address: Google Campus, 4-5 Bonhill Street, London, EC2A 4BX