Must include integrity, tenacity and motivation
Podcast transcription - 2nd october
Alan Cowley: Welcome to the Invested Investor Podcast. This week, I'm lucky to have Christopher Mirabile with me. Christopher is a former chair and current public policy chair of the Angel Capital Association in America. He's a co-founder of the portfolio management tool, seraf-investor.com, as well as being the co-managing director of Launchpad Venture Group. Christopher is also a former legal counsel, so he has all the aspects of the early stage venture ecosystem covered. Christopher, how did a lawyer become such a prominent figure in the American investor scene?
Christopher Mirabile: That's a great question and it's a question I sometimes ask myself. I guess I'll go back to the beginning. I got out of college in the late '80s and the economy was booming and I ended up wanting to get as broad an exposure to as many different things as possible and I ended up in management consulting with one of the strategy boutique practices at one of the large accounting firms. I was with the strategic consulting group at Pricewaterhouse and that was a terrific learning experience, travelling all over the world and working for really big blue chip audit clients like General Motors and other companies. When the time came to think about what was next, there were about 12 of us at my sort of staff consultant level, 10 went back to business school and two of us went back to law school. I was one of the black sheep who went back to law school.
I did it mostly because I didn't necessarily think an MBA was a good next move for me. I didn't want to stay in consulting and I didn't want to be a brand manager for a big company and I didn't have an entrepreneurial idea and I didn't want to go into investment banking. So I sort of thought law is an area that had always interested me and it wouldn't limit me at all. I remember back in the day I read an article about it, so how a surprising number of CEOs had gone up that path. I thought this is a turnkey interesting area that I'll enjoy studying regardless and it won't limit my options going forward. So I took a very business focused law degree back in Boston at Boston College. The early '90s recession, it was perfectly timed. I was in grad school at the time and I popped out in the years leading up to the dot-com boom and I ended up in a very, very busy corporate practise with a firm that just did a tremendous amount of work with start-ups and IPOs and M&A and venture capital fund formation and venture financing.
That was really my first taste of sort of being on the cutting edge of technology companies and start-ups and early stage financing. I can remember as a young lawyer working with all these signature pages and all these individual investors and all the VC funds and just really loving that space. I ended up taking a bit of a detour because one of my clients was an Irish software company, enterprise software company, and I took them public in an IPO on Nasdaq. They were the first Irish software company to go public on Nasdaq. They were an interesting company that had grown quickly and they were relatively light on controls and governance and they needed help. So I sort of went in to the legal department to sort of drive the revenue and drive the controls and processes of sort of being a public company and it just turned out I really loved that work.
I did a lot of licencing work and I ultimately became head of global legal operations, the general counsel. It was a company that did about 50% of its revenue in the US, about 30 in Europe and 20 in Asia Pacific and had a lot of customers in finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, government and defence. They're software is embedded in a lot of other vendors' software. So it was a really fun, really complex run. I ended up taking over as the CFO of that company and sold it. It was a kind of a crazy story. But I sold the company. We sold the company right during the meltdown in 2008. In fact, Lehman Brothers was the bank that took the company public, led our IPO. So they were the bank that handled the sale 11, 12 years later and it turned out that we ended up closing the deal on a Friday in September of 2008 and Lehman brothers went bankrupt the following morning on Saturday.
So, I was the last CFO to ever do an M&A transaction with Lehman brothers. I popped out of that company sort of in cash at the absolute bottom of the market in 2009 and I had had such a great run. I thought it was going to be unlikely that I was going to really be able to replicate that experience and I just wanted to do something different. I had the flexibility to take a little bit of time off and I was really drawn back towards the start-upscene and the innovation and the sort of what's next and what's new. I got connected into a couple of the angel networks in the Boston area and just really never looked back.
Alan Cowley: So, where did you first hear about angel investing then?
Christopher Mirabile: So, I was sort of dimly aware of it back in the early days as a young associate in the law firm because those signature pages were, a lot of them were angels, co-investing before VCs or with VCs. So I had sort of this vague awareness of it. But as I was sort of getting out in 2009 and kind of networking around, it kept kind of popping up and my networking sort of focused in that direction. Before I knew it I was connected with a couple of the networks and really decided to focus on that at least in the short term and here I am kind of 12 years later or something.
Alan Cowley: Yeah. Okay. Let's take it back. What attracted you in the first out? So you just sold this company. What attracted you to get into, other than just the start-up ecosystem, what really attracted you to angel investing?
Christopher Mirabile: Ever the pragmatist, I guess I thought a lot about what I wanted to do, and I just decided I really didn't want another desk job. It had been a really, really tough long stretch. The kids were young and I was commuting to Ireland a lot. I just had had a job that was sort of all-consuming and I wanted to get a little bit better life balance and I thought a lot about more entrepreneurial kinds of things. I actually worked with a broker and I looked at buying my own business and that was something that I spent a fair amount of time researching and that's a very, very tricky space. A lot of businesses, the ones that you'd want aren't for sale, put it that way. The ones that are for sale aren't necessarily businesses you'd want to own.
When you really think about it, you end up really committed and under diversified in a lot of ways. You ended up with all your eggs in one basket and you're living and dying by the cash flow of that business. I was thinking more in kind of a fund direction. I wanted to be more diversified in more companies and have more things going on. So for me it was much more of a natural fit to kind of move in that, in the angel direction. Then the ability to leverage your financial capital with human capital, the ability to kind of help and give advice and sort of that realisation, "Oh, I've seen that problem before. I have a suggestion that might be helpful." You sort of start to go like start-ups are so hungry for help and you're like, "Wow, I might be able to contribute here a little bit." So it becomes very kind of rewarding.
Once you've done a few investments, it's sort of addictive. You start to really go, and that's what's ended up with me. I mean I don't even know how many I've done, I mean, directly, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 60 or 70 direct investments.
Alan Cowley: How many of those are still going? Do you know?
Christopher Mirabile: I'd say two-thirds of them are still active. I've had a pretty good number of exits, sort of half positive, half negative.
Alan Cowley: Do you remember the first?
Christopher Mirabile: The first investment? Yeah, actually that was ... I got about a 2X and it should have been about a 10X because that was a company that at the time we invested, they were basically creating technology to annotate the web. You could cruise around and look at stuff and sort of post notes and collect citations and information and then they went out to Y Combinator and they ended up pivoting into really, they had built one of the first engines for rendering PDFs and HTML5 at the time and it ended up ... They basically got acquired by box.com for their technology and their ability to render PDFs for serving box files on mobile devices was really what it boiled down too. But that was pretty good.
It was a lesson in a lot of different ways. One of the lessons being that even when you win, sometimes it's for the wrong reasons, or for reasons you didn't anticipate. So ultimately the value created by that company was not the value they set out to create when they built the first plan. But so yeah, I've done a lot of direct investing and I'm an LP and a couple of ed tech funds, so I have a bunch of direct, indirect stuff through that. I'm an LP in a couple of funds in San Diego that kind of gives me a geographical diversification. Then I'm a GP in a couple of small funds, one bigger and one smaller that are focused on the angel space. Then of course Launchpad has got a big portfolio of companies. So, I'm supervising a lot of start-ups.
Alan Cowley: Are they all just in the States?
Christopher Mirabile: Yeah, I don't think I have ... I have one investment in Canada.
Alan Cowley: Did they move to Canada though?
Christopher Mirabile: No, no. They were there. Actually, now that I think about it, I believe I have two. I'm an investor in a company called Hockey Stick and a company called ExpertFile on both of those guys are up in Canada. Those were more networking to the entrepreneur, knew someone who knew someone, but everything else is in North America and the bulk of it is in the East Coast with the exception of the indirect investments through the funds in San Diego.
Alan Cowley: Okay. So you've talked about what kind of excites you about angel investing. What pains you about it?
Christopher Mirabile: Well, there's certainly a lot of losses. Start-ups are a really, tricky business. I mean when you think about it, sort of the classic start-up is a team that's never done it before creating technology that's never existed before to serve a market that doesn't exist yet. What could possibly go wrong, you know? So, there's a lot of would have, could have, should haves when you watch and sometimes it's just so painful to see a start-up that there really is a market opportunity and the problem is real. But for reasons having to do with timing or the sort of talent deficit on the management team or the availability of capital or the technology just not working out, you see viable things just go under and that's frustrating and that's actually a psychological shift that you kind of have to ... I don't know if being a dog breeder is the right analogy, but you can't save every company.
The temptation is to try to get in and fix everything and you can't because some number of them are going to fail inevitably anyway. You'll exhaust yourself trying to fix everything and you have to sort of find that balance where you try to put your efforts into turning the B's into A's rather than turning the C's and D's into Bs and that's hard. But it's a little bit like a tree grows and it falls and then it rots and it makes the soil better and another tree takes its place. In some ways, keeping a company on life support where it's just not destined to succeed is a waste of capital. That could be put into some job creating successful company. So you have to be little bit philosophic about it. But it's frustrating because you see companies that fail through no fault of anyone and they could have probably been saved.
Alan Cowley: Do you think that's your own personal biggest failure with some of these angel investments, that you've tried to drag them on for longer than they should have done?
Christopher Mirabile: Well there, I have regrets around follow on checks I've written and companies that in retrospect the handwriting was on the wall and I feel like the second half of my angel career as a lot more thoughtful.
Alan Cowley: You've learned from that?
Christopher Mirabile: Yeah, about the follow-on checks. But I just had a company, I think in the end I wrote a five checks for this company over the course of a long eight or 10 years. Luckily, the checks were so decreasing in size and I hadn't done a check in a number of years, but I just sold my stock back to the founder for a dollar. The reason was that they had struggled in their capital. They'd been done, a couple of cram downs and really, the cap table had become sort of a mess. I calculated that if this company had done a $250 million exit for all my five checks worth of investment, I would have gotten about a $4,300 return. The net present value of the tax write off was so much higher than any conceivable return. So as I sold my stock back to the founder and said, "Good on you, best of luck."
Alan Cowley: Yeah, best of luck. Keep going.
Christopher Mirabile: He wasn't even the CEO anymore at that point. So yeah. So I think the psychology of, well, if I don't follow on, that means I was wrong to invest in the first place. So you have to sort of say to yourself, "Yeah, I got to own it. I was wrong and I'm not going to compound." The only thing worse than a mistake is an expensive mistake and continuing to follow on in accompany that isn't going to make it turns a mistake into an expensive mistake.
Alan Cowley: So, you've got over 60 investments. You've got Launchpad as well as your own angel investments. Would you class yourself as an expert?
Christopher Mirabile: No. It is really hard to hold yourself out as an expert in
An area where half the time you're wrong. I sometimes joke that angel investing is the "science" of turning a 90% start-up failure rate into a 50% portfolio failure rate. And when you are investing in maybe 3% to 5% of the companies that you look at, which is pretty typical of angels and VCs, depending on how you define the funnel, maybe 5% you might invest in that you see and you're still wrong half the time. It's kind of hard to build yourself as an expert. Maybe slightly better than throwing a dart at a phone book.
It's a hard, hard game. Start-ups invent new ways to fail every day and you just sometimes get taken out by things you just couldn't have foreseen, timing or technology. You're taking a lot of risk, which is why you end up owning a big chunk of the company, relatively speaking. You're investing at a very early stage.
And you have, the ability to help and de-risk your financial investment with assistance with human capital, but you're taking a tonne of risk. And even when something goes pretty well, sometimes like with that first investment I did, you end up being right, but for the wrong reasons. And so you have to be philosophical about this.
And the reality is that when you talk to any sort of successful angel who's had a really, profitable angel career, the vast, majority of their returns came from a tiny one or two big hits. And so part of it is just being in the game long enough and being diversified enough that you give yourself the chance to include a couple of those wins in your portfolio.
We've had a pretty good run in the last couple of years at Launchpad. We've got one company that just became a unicorn, our first unicorn on paper, like that's worth anything. But we've had multiple opportunities to take money out of the company as the VCs have continued to add money. I mean, we've taken $20 million out of the company over time and our holdings are still worth 36 million or more.
So that's one that's going to really be disproportionately influential in the portfolios of the investors. And we've got another one as a small investment, looks like it's going to be exiting at the end of this month or beginning of next month that probably be in the ballpark of a 20X return. So you can fund 19 mistakes with one 20X return. Assuming you put the same amount into every company.
Alan Cowley: Have you broken even yet?
Christopher Mirabile: Probably not, but I'm probably really, really close. I think my check writing in the last few years has largely been funded by liquidity. And when I sort of think about the sort of pool or fund that I invest out of the current cash plus valuation is slightly over 2X relative to where I started. But I've been recycling so it's a little muddy. After this company exits, I probably will be overall positive. But I have had some good liquidity in recent years and so I have not been adding new capital in quite a number of years, which is cool.
Alan Cowley: So, once you break even, that's it, you're done?
Christopher Mirabile: No. I keep going. I'm young. I'm in my early 50s and I think I've got another decade, if not a decade and a half of angel investing to do. And that's really the model. In some ways, an angel investor is a two-legged evergreen fund, right?
In the early years, you're just pouring capital into the asset class. The first year is all fun, you invest in some new companies. The second year, still pretty fun. You add some new companies, but a couple of them have failed or need more money.
And the third year starts to really test your mettle because you're adding more companies, but you've definitely had some losses and everybody else needs more money and you haven't really had any wins yet. And so once you sort of get over that hump and you start to get into a situation where you're regularly harvesting wins and losses and there's some money turning over, it's much easier to sort of sustain yourself. And that's definitely the mode I'm in and I'm enjoying it very much.
Alan Cowley: That was brilliant. Let's have a quick look at the entrepreneurs. What does your ideal entrepreneur look like?
Christopher Mirabile: Well, they come in all shapes and sizes and I don't have an archetype. It's so much as a list of attributes, I guess. One question that comes up a lot is this notion of should you be investing in the young kid right out of school, the hot shot with the crazy idea versus the grey haired entrepreneur.
And I think that's a bit of a red herring as a question because I think it depends a lot on the opportunity. If you're looking at a problem and a solution that's really an evolution of the state of the art for a problem that's buried fairly deeply in an industry, probably experience, grey haired experience and execution skills and a really big network and a deep knowledge of the customer and the market is really what you want. So in that kind of a scenario, that's the type of entrepreneur you wanted back.
Whereas if you're doing something where you're creating something that's never existed before, disrupting a market, it's all brand new and different in conventional wisdom, it's not going to be that helpful. You probably want a young kid who's too crazy to realise what they're doing is impossible.
So, it depends a little bit on the situation, but what they all have in common, I think, we really focus on the team more than anything else because we think the plans are so subject to change. And when we think about the teams, we're really looking for a couple of things. Obviously, integrity beyond everything else. Just the sense of dealing with a person with good character, honesty, integrity, high morals. I mean you're basically giving them money with no recourse and trusting their judgement to manage it in a difficult, ambiguous situation.
So, integrity is probably the biggest one. Tenacity is a really, really important one. Just you looking for someone who will just walk through walls and you think a little bit about the motivation and why they're doing it and whether they're doing it for the right reasons.
We also look for sort of EQ and IQ. The person has to be pretty smart, but they also have to have a high EQ and those people skills to be able to convince people to come along and to get things done through other people. Those capabilities are very important.
Alan Cowley: Do you find technical founders lack that EQ, that emotional ...
Christopher Mirabile: well, I wouldn't want to throw every engineer under the bus by any stretch, but what's the old joke? How can you tell if an engineer is extroverted? She looks at your shoes when she talks to you rather than her own.
I think temperament, actually, all joking aside, I think you are getting at an important question. There is a tension there because some of the things that make you an inventor, just questioning the status quo and thinking differently and kind of being lost in your own head, in your own thoughts and creating new things aren't necessarily the same temperamental attributes that a person who has a high EQ and can get things done.
I mean, in some ways it's almost as stark as that sort of inventor profiles really, almost sort of a classic introvert if you were to really generalise. And sort of the CEO paradigm, that's kind of a classic extrovert. And so you end up ... I think it's very, very rare that you'll find someone who has both.
There are people who sort of are in the middle of that introvert-extrovert spectrum, but they're not that common. And maybe they're not as good at either extreme as someone who is at the extreme. But what you end up finding is that getting that balance, finding the sort of the classic three-person team where there's a deep technical person, a real leadership person, then maybe a marketing and sales kind of a person.
And so that's one of the things that's on our list when we're looking at teams is figuring out where that leadership is going to come from, but also figuring out where that technical expertise is going to come from. Market knowledge is definitely something we look at as well in many, many situations.
Alan Cowley: So, let's touch on that market knowledge. When you have a scale of an idea and an entrepreneur is pitching to you, how do you kind of almost guess or understand whether that market is going to be? Whether it's right, whether there's a problem, whether it's big enough.
Christopher Mirabile: Yeah. So it's a really good, difficult, complicated question. So we tend not to do a lot of consumer investing where you're just guessing whether something is on trend or not, because that's really hard. Consumers are fickle and easily distracted.
There probably are people who know how to predict the next pop record, but I'm not one of them. And so we've tended to sort of feel like we can't do risk and add value to those kinds of consumer play. So we wouldn't have been good investors for Snapchat or Instagram. We tend to focus on need to have products in the B2B context.
And in that context, you can talk to prospective customers or existing customers and try to understand their problem. And more importantly, where the problem falls in the priority ranking for them. Because that's a really critical question. Start-ups have limited resources. And one of their biggest challenges is they're trying to overcome inertia.
The familiar and good enough is the biggest competitor a lot of start-ups face. It's just people don't want to take a big risk to try something new unless its benefits are really, really compelling. And so entrepreneurs love to talk about massive markets, but their real market is limited in the beginning to those people who really would consider this problem to be a number one or number two level priority. Who the start-up can find, and reach, and speak to, and sell to; inexpensively?
So, urgency and prioritisation of the problem really become the key to the market assessment in the early days. And we tend to talk about it in terms of oxygen, aspirin and jewellery. Every product is either oxygen, someone can't live without it. Or aspirin, it's just really good pain relief. Sometimes people call it vitamins versus medicine, but aspirin is sort of as a pain relief. And then jewellery is a nice to have.
And when you talk about market sizing, invariably every product has sort of a pretty large market of people who would view it as aspirin and nice to have, good thing to have. And then a smaller subset of really view it as oxygen. And when a start-up is getting started, it's that oxygen subset that you're really trying to size. That's what really matters.
And then over time, they can spend more on sales and marketing and educate more customers and build a brand and start to reach beyond into the broader aspirin market, if you will.
Alan Cowley: So, the awareness in a pitch, if they understand that it's not just the big oxygen market, it is more of a niche market stuff, because that's a big tick.
Christopher Mirabile: Yeah. That's really what I mean when I say market knowledge is this awareness. It's like, "Oh yeah, there's plenty of people who would want this." Well, who are they? How many and how badly do they want it and at what price?
Alan Cowley: For the markets worth two billion.
Christopher Mirabile: Yeah, exactly. So those critical making the plan in those early years really is what determines whether people are going to follow on, whether the company can access the capital it needs to grow. And those early years, it's not that many customers and it's about trying to get initial deals closed. So that's kind of what we think about market knowledge.
Alan Cowley: So, you touched on pitching. Have you ever been at a pitching event or someone is pitching to you and then they spin it around and they start kind of divulging who you are as an investor? I've always wanted this.
Christopher Mirabile: Unpack that for me further. Would they start drilling in to me?
Alan Cowley: Yeah. Because an entrepreneur should do their due diligence on their investor as well as domestic. Obviously, doing it the other way around. Have you ever had a pitch where they've actually start asking you questions about who you are in a way?
Well, sure, the good ones will think a lot about ... Money is fungible. Finding investors with good chemistry who can add value is critically important. And I give this advice to entrepreneurs all the time that they should be thoughtful about who they approach and what their approach is.
And the analogy I sometimes use is it's the difference between saying I want to go to the prom versus I want to go to the prom with you. And it's much more effective to be thinking about. I'll often ask entrepreneurs, "So who's the perfect investor for you?" And sometimes I get this blank stare, like I never really thought about that.
But introducing this idea that you want investors who are at a minimum going to be easy to get along with and understand the risks and understand the timelines and be patient. Every once in a while, you'll end up on a cap table with an investor who just doesn't get start-ups and they're expecting a level of reporting, and a level of success, and a level of progress, and a level of speed that just isn't characteristic of the market.
But beyond that, having an entrepreneur who understands the value of having the right, good investor base around them. So when that happens and they're starting to ask me about my fit for their opportunity, I view that as a really, really good sign. I am not offended by that in the slightest.
Alan Cowley: That's brilliant. All right, so let's move on to Seraphinvestor.com, your portfolio management platform.
Christopher Mirabile: Yup.
Alan Cowley: What
Christopher Mirabile: Well-
Alan Cowley: How does it work? How's it going to change the future of investing?
Christopher Mirabile: Well, if all my mistakes as an investor didn't keep me humble, being a founder, certainly, will. It's actually a pretty interesting, it's a classic entrepreneurial story. I mean, my Launchpad partner, Ham Lord and I, really are sort of motivated by the idea that entrepreneurship matters a tonne, in terms of the future of our country and job creation and social justice and social mobility.
It's just a super, national competitiveness. It's a super, super important force in our economy and our society. And, we think, entrepreneurship matters a lot. And when you look at angel investing and you look at entrepreneurship, you realise angel investing really matters a lot to entrepreneurship. It's critically, critically important.
Statistically, start-ups have a far greater chance of working with angels than VCs in the United States. Something on the order of 4,000-5,000 start-ups get VC money in the U.S. Each year. Upwards of 70,000 get angel money.
So, it's a really, big force and, when you start to look at it, Ham and I are just really motivated by a desire to, kind of, professionalise angel investing. And, one of the areas that's been a challenge is managing these complex portfolios.
You get into these companies and there's documents flying every-where and you'll end up in one security, like a convertible note. Maybe, there'll be some warrant coverage and then the note will convert and then there'll be a recap. And, it can get really, really complicated, and so tracking your performance becomes nearly impossible with a spreadsheet.
And, the problem is in n factorial when you have a lot of investments and a lot of rounds. And when Ham and I started working together in Launchpad, the spreadsheet had reached the point where it was pretty unmanageable, and it was difficult to, kind of, pull any learnings or insights out of it to understand are we getting better at this?
What do we learn and what is our portfolio trying to tell us? And, so we went out looking for a better tool and there really wasn't much on the market. And, there were some super expensive, $30,000.00-$50,000.00 a year packages sort of designed for the private equity industry or for the venture capital industry. But, they were really heavyweight and they were very focused on internal fund accounting with some of the complexities associated with those funds.
And, we just thought there's got to be a better way. So, we started to look at the idea of lashing something together, and that's really where Seraf came from. And, it was essentially the classic entrepreneurial genesis when we built something we needed. And, that's really what the beginning of Seraf was. It was just a web based portal to manage these investments in a way that wasn't a flat spreadsheet file.
And, we socialised it around with some people and everybody wanted to use it, and everyone had all these suggestions for making it better. And, before you know it, the punch list of product features that were requested is really long. And, so you're faced with, how do you fund the development of that?
And, so we decided to release it as a SAS product with a focus on empowering early stage investors, individual angels, accelerators, small funds. And, it's grown very steadily. We've been funding it ourselves. We have a small team. We haven't spent a lot of money on marketing or sales, but we have a global customer base now. I think we're approaching $10 billion dollars, worth of investments on the platform at this point. Thousands of companies, tens of thousands of rounds of investment, lots and lots of activity, and, really a global customer base. And, so there's clearly a demand, and the product has grown in sophistication over time.
Ironically, we've added a lot of those fund management features, capital calls, and the ability to model valuations and added some CRM type capability to help people manage their deal flow before they invest. The original vision of Seraf, absolutely is still in place, which is that it's management after you write the check.
But we've added a lot of capabilities to help you draw insights out of your portfolio, learn from the ability to juxtapose investment dollars to returns in the same year to understand sort of which years are profitable and which years aren't. A lot of visualisations of your data, but mostly just a really simple way to track stuff and put your documents, the investor reports and the deal documents, all that stuff's super easily loadable. You can email them to your account, and they'll get filed and just focus on that reporting. And, one of the funds that Ham and I manage, we were sort of reluctant GPs on the fund, but we said to the LPs, we're not going to do a lot of reporting.
You're going to get a password to a Seraf account, and you can look at all the companies and you could look at the performance anytime you want. Live real time, you can read all the investor reports. Each company's going to have all it's, reporting right there, and we're not going to spend our time reporting to you. We're going to spend our time finding start-ups and investing in helping those start-ups succeed.
And, if you guys want to know what's going on in the fund, login and look. Let us know if you have a question. And, that's actually a pretty appealing way to run a fund. And it also is, it's helped us run. Launchpad ends up being one of the bigger customers of Seraf, just because we're such a big group. And, we run everything on there and it's become an indispensable tool for me. So it's been a lot of fun. We've learned a lot.
Alan Cowley: That was brilliant. Let's just move on to Angel Capital Association. How long have you been a member of the Angel Capital Association and, kind of, just give us a quick overview of what you do here in America and how you help investors and entrepreneurs.
Christopher Mirabile: Sure. The Angel Capital Association now is about 15 years old, came out of a desire at the Kauffman Foundation to better connect investors. The people, Kauffman, is very focused on entrepreneurship, and the original genesis was maybe there's a way to help these investors who are helping our entrepreneurs connect them together. And, that's really where it started.
I joined as soon as I got into the angel space. I thought it was a great platform for learning. And, the Angel Capital Association really is about sort of three things, networking, get connecting investors to each other, teaching, surfacing and promulgating best practises, teaching people how to do this better. And, then the third thing is really the public policy lobbying, and educating our legislators and regulators about the importance of the work that we do and trying to at least avoid destructive legislation, if not actually pass helpful legislation.
I was a member for a, number of years and the Chair at the time was David Verrill. And, as he was thinking about recruiting people to the board, he asked me to join the board, and I think that was about seven years ago. And, I joined the board and was involved in a number of the committees, marketing and membership and a lot in public policy. Given my background as a securities lawyer, the public policy was a very natural fit for me. And, I took over as Vice-chair for David and then succeeded him as the Chair on the immediate prior administration before Linda Smith.
And, I'm now in Emeritus mode, having completed my second term on the board and have been really focused on public policy and the data project to a degree, but public policy sort of more than anything else. It's just a wonderful organisation. I think, like every non-profit it struggles to get enough resources. It got so many more ideas than resources.
Alan Cowley: Yeah.
Christopher Mirabile: I've met some incredible people at these summits. This is where you and I are at the summit in Chicago, right now in the spring of 2019. And, these summits are sort of a mixture of stimulation and learning and meeting new people, but also connecting with old friends. And, I just find them to be an invaluable part of my professional angelism.
Alan Cowley: No, they are, definitely stimulating and it's so great to meet so many interesting people.
Christopher Mirabile: Yeah.
Alan Cowley: Let's just finish with one last question. So, you're across the boards with VC angels, you've got your own start-up as well. What are you curious about and what do you think the, kind of, new prospects in the start-up world are going to be in the next one to five years?
Christopher Mirabile: For me, I'm fortunate that my biggest fascination is really that intersection of technology and daily life. I'm not that interested in technology, just for the sake of it. I'm interested in the impacts of technology. And, I think a lot about, so where technology's driving us and changing. And, so I mean, everything I look at is interesting on some level. The machine learning, the AI, I think the crypto space, the distributed ledger technologies, the blockchain technologies are interesting.
But I find myself, a lot of times it's infrastructure. It's, like, mobile devices, wireless, telecommunications. I think that's an enduring fascination for me. It's boring as hell to say this, but we tend to have these technology waves where tremendous impact and value are created. The original computer mainframe era, then the micro-computer and then the PC era, then the internet era and then the wireless era. And, we've pushed computing power farther and farther out. I mean, smart phones have more computing power than the entire Apollo mission to the moon, any smartphone, cheap smartphone you buy.
And, so these waves of technology are just fascinating, and they create a lot of value. It's boring to say this compared to the sexiness of machine learning or computer image analysis and stuff, but I actually think 5G is going to be a pretty big deal.
Alan Cowley: In what way? The way it connects things, or-
Christopher Mirabile: Well, I think, an analogy that I sometimes draw on is that legend has it that for years Google approached a lot of management and product decisions and strategy decisions, with this idea of, "Well, we're not sure what to do, but what would you do if bandwidth and computing power were infinite?"
Okay, we'll do that because that's the trend, right? And, I think 5G is fascinating to me, because how would the world be different if you had a really, really high bandwidth connection with exceedingly low latency? You could imagine I wouldn't be leaping into this vehicle, but you could imagine a vehicle that was tethered to a remote decision making capability.
Like I said, I wouldn't be the architecture, I would love to drive around in. But, essentially a zero latency connection that's very, very high bandwidth allows you to put serious cloud computing resources out at the absolute edge of the network. And, I think that we're going to see a real explosion. I think the combination of 5G and sensors is going to create really profound societal change. The internet of things with sensors and the 5G back haul, I think the world is going to become an increasingly data centric and instrumented place, and that that's going to be an entirely new wave of value creation, new paradigms, new business models, new technologies, new wealth created.
Christopher Mirabile: So, it's, kind of, boring because it's not like 5G's a surprise, but to me I think that's going to be the defining story of the next decade.
Alan Cowley: You'll have to listen to one of our other podcasts by a lady called, Ros Singleton.
Christopher Mirabile: Sure.
Alan Cowley: She's head of the UK 5G.
Christopher Mirabile: Oh great. I look forward to that. I will download that and listen to it on the way home.
Alan Cowley: Brilliant. Christopher, it was absolutely fantastic to have you on the Invested Investor podcast. Again, I can't thank you enough for everything. It's been hugely insightful, interesting and exciting.
Christopher Mirabile: My pleasure. I'm a big fan of the work you and your father do, and I've enjoyed becoming your friends over the years. And, I'm delighted to have a chance to be with you on the podcast, so-
Alan Cowley: Perfect. Thanks.
Peter Cowley: Thanks for listening to another Invested Investor podcast. You can subscribe to all future podcasts via our website, investedinvestor.com or via a number of podcast platforms online. Remember, you can order our book online and be sure to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to get the most up to date interesting and insightful content from the Invested investor.
