In September, Thilmin Gee and I met Angela Lee to start discussing projects for her most recent start-up, 37Angels. It was very interesting to hear about Angela’s experience: she is a former McKinsey consultant, has founded 3 other businesses, and is also a teacher at NYU and UC Berkeley. She is now striving to get more women involved in angel investing with her latest venture. The name 37Angels stems from how only 13% of angel investors are female and she would like to see that change by 37 percentage points so it will be an even 50-50 men to women ratio.
Our initial work was to ghost blog and tweet and then go through the angels-in-training boot camp. In November, we helped to put on 37Angel’s first live pitch event, which took place on Thursday, November 15th. 8 different entrepreneurs gave 2 minute pitches to an audience of 30+ investors, 3 of which were voted on as companies the investors want to do due diligence on and invest in. I cannot give specific details on the companies just yet but if you like or are interested in snack food, women’s healthy living at all ages, or couponing, you will definitely be interested in one of these companies.
The due diligence process is just beginning with a current angel-in-training leading the process for each of the three companies. In the next week, we will sit in on calls with the entrepreneurs and then draft deal memos. It will be exciting to see how much funding each of these 3 companies receives and then how they use it to grow in the upcoming year.
This post was written by Julia Avrutin, MBA Class of 2014, NYU Stern School of Business