Irvine-based Tech Coast Angels’ ACE Fund II, short for Angel Capital Entrepreneur, scored an almost eight-fold return on its investment in the Oklahoma City-based WeGoLook platform.
WeGoLook connects people and companies with on-demand investigators to inspect and verify conditions in remote locations for insurance purposes, for example.
ACE Fund investor Dave Berkus met with the company’s founders when he traveled to Oklahoma in 2014. He was impressed by WeGoLook enough to invest but initially was told by the founders— husband-and-wife team Robin and Mat Smith—that they were already fully invested and had closed the round.
Berkus said it took three weeks to get permission from primary investor I2e, a venture fund based in Tulsa, to reopen it.
Tech Coast Angel’s fund finally was able to invest an initial $100,000 that it followed with more than $100,000 the following year for a grand total of approximately $211,000, Berkus said. WeGoLook was sold about two years later to Atlanta-based Crawford & Co. for more than $42.5 million.
The company had a “very low pre-money valuation” based on its location in the Midwest, where investment opportunities are rarer and not inflated, Berkus said.
“Most angel investments take years,” he said.
Tech Coast Angels is the largest angel investor group in the U.S. and is comprised of five regional networks, comprising Orange County, San Diego, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and the Central Coast encompassing San Fernando Valley, Ventura County and Santa Barbara. Members are accredited investors who collectively invest in the range of $250,000 to $2 million. Tech Coast Angels created the ACE Fund as an investment opportunity for accredited individuals and institutional investors.
Influencers Launch How-To
Two “brand strategists” have launched a personal branding accelerator based in the Eureka co-working building in Irvine. Ryan Foland and Leonard Kim created online personal branding course InfluenceTree and are its co-managing partners.
Foland is a professional “communicator” who lives in Long Beach and coaches leaders worldwide on how to simplify spoken and written messages to achieve more impact. He invented the “3-1-3 Theory” of pitches that begin as three sentences, get condensed into one sentence, and then get boiled down to three words. He also MCs the monthly OC Tech Happy Hour Meetup.
Kim, who lives in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, said he endured multiple professional and personal setbacks and almost became homeless. He said that when he started writing about his failures and what he learned from them, he soon had people sharing their problems and asking for advice, interest that blossomed into a following that ultimately grew to more than 370,000 social media followers. He said he developed a formula for how to hyper-accelerate the growth of a personal brand. Foland asked him for advice on how to promote and syndicate writing and interviews he was conducting, and Foland now has more than 175,000 Twitter followers.
The InfluenceTree curriculum consists of one lesson per week for one year in the form of a seven-minute video with an accompanying lesson plan. It costs $99 per month. Foland and Kim offer personal brand development for those who want the help but are too busy to take the course.
U.K. Synergies
An Aliso Viejo-based technology innovation accelerator, along with representatives of the Greater Irvine Chamber of Commerce, traveled to the U.K. recently to meet with various organizations, including startups, incubators and connectors that are considering setting up offices in Orange County.
OCTANe, along with chamber officials and representatives of the Center for International Trade, the University of California-Irvine and companies including Edwards Lifesciences, met with approximately three dozen companies over a few days at the London office of K&L Gates LLP, OCTANe Chief Executive Bill Carpou said.
One of the U.K. companies they met with was Cambridge, England-based One Nucleus, which has almost 500 member companies representing the medical device, diagnostic, pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Carpou said that now that voters approved the exit of the U.K. from the European Union, many U.K. companies believe that they will be hemmed in without being part of the E.U. and are looking at the U.S. for business opportunities. Orange County provides a base of med-tech companies, access to capital, and a jumping off point to Asia, he said.
Carpou has invited the companies to OCTANe’s annual ophthalmology conference in June and its med-tech conference in October.
“The move here of companies that are already somewhat established would accelerate job growth and lend a greater international footprint,” Carpou said. “The relationship would also work in reverse and provide an entry point for companies coming through our accelerator to expand into the U.K.”
OCTANe recently nearly tripled its office space, moving from a 900-square-foot space to a 2,500-square-foot office; both locations are in Tech Space buildings. It just launched a platform for members called The Portal by OCTANe to match startups with investors and growth advisers.
