Angels in the Architecture

It's been busy over the past few weeks. Specifically I seem to have been spending a lot of time in the company of Angel Investment folk. Makes them sound a little like pixies.. Anyway, there are worse people to spend time with. I haven't yet met an uninteresting person in that particular field. I guess it's because they have to deal well in two directions, both those with the cash, and those with the ideas.

I thought it's worth passing on a few gems I heard over that time, properly credited of course.

Firstly, from Pat Geraghty, partner at Central England Business Angels, a few words of advice on what not to say if you're hoping for Angel funding:

• It's such a good idea I don't need a business plan
• It's such a complex idea a need a 200 page business plan
• I deserve a £70K/pa salary as CEO
• So do my mum (company secretary), dad (CTO) and sister (I give up - director perhaps?)
• The first year our turnover will be £30K, rising to £4M in the second year
• We're British, so we don't actually do "sales." (Pat is not from 'round here' of course.)
• However, our product is self evidently fantastic, and will immediately get 50% of the market
• Because there is no competition
• I have all the business skills needed to run the company

Looking around there was a mixture of laughter and sheepish looks as she ran down the list. Some from the same people.

A few days later and Stephen McEwen from Beer and Partners was able to give the flip side of the coin. What three things must be centre stage in your (commendably brief) business plan?

I was pleased to get my guess right in his entertaining interactive presentation.

• How much money is needed?
• What exactly is it for?
• When and how do I get it back?

Interestingly I discovered that one key difference between VCs and Angels might be in the length of business plan required. Pat was adamant; 10 pages maximum. The consensus from VCs was that up to 30 was acceptable. Perhaps it's a concentration span issue? Luckily Beer and Partners do a very good guide on how to do a tailored business plan for submission to Angels, which I thoroughly recommend. (I notice they also mention 30 pages, but I would recommend less than that, personally.)

Good luck!

A game changing present - and why I think BBC radio 4 was wrong.

I hope you had a great holiday, and Santa brought you what you wanted. I was lucky enough to get a Sony e-reader for Christmas. I hadn't asked for it, so it was the ideal gift; an unexpected, yet useful, gadget I wouldn't have thought of buying for myself. It took a little while to start getting the most out of it, due to a few technical points which aren't worth cluttering up the main part of this post with. ( (*)I'll put them at the bottom for those who are interested!)

Having (eventually) got to grips with it, I heard an item on eBooks on a BBC Radio 4 arts programme, and listened attentively. Disappointingly they clearly seemed to miss the point, bemoaning the advance of technology, yet adamant that the paper book would still rule supreme.

The key game changing aspects for me are:

1) Free books! The wonderful "Feedbooks", amongst others, provide budding authors a way to bring their work to readers' attention without having to engage the interest of agents or publishers. Some authors (like Doctorow) use free e-publications to promote their paper output, others to supplant it. Either way, if I ran a vanity publishing house, I would be very, very worried. Of course, there is also access to a vast collection of free material which is out of copyright. Will this engender a renewed uptake in the classics? I don't think so, although it could make studying English Literature at university very much cheaper - and this educational aspect has some potential for changing the notion of "school text books". The collection of heavy tomes I remember carrying round could be replaced by one slim electronic volume with everything loaded on it (and set to expire after a year.) This has scope to drastically reduce the cost to learning centres of providing textbooks for their pupils, as they could effectively "rent" the digital rights for those works still in copyright.

2) Free newspapers. I can set "Calibre" to download the electronic versions of The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph for me overnight (I always try and read at least two contrasting viewpoints), automatically uploading them to the eReader. No adverts, no ink to rub off on hands, and they always arrive before I leave - yet I don't then have to carry around a weighty laptop - or weighty piles of paper! Of course, I can also download paid content (the Economist for example) but the free options change the game. Clearly newspapers want to make money, and others will have to follow in the footsteps of print media looking to earn income from their digital content - but once they do, it will probably push more people to other sources, such as the BBC, or consolidators, such as "Instapaper". Either that, or we will see more advertising masquerading as articles, to ensure that the items that fund the journalism get in front of the punters.

So what startups may we see looking to exploit the niche that is gradually widening as the platforms improve? My initial guesses would be in the fields of education and news. Look for "bundled content" - selling a package of items rather than a single epublication, and subscription based services targeted on a specialisation. For example, a potential field would be in maintenance and support applications; automatically updating car manuals for the AA and RAC, for example. It would be perfectly possible for a single reader to have all the technical information for all the likely models of car found on the UK's roads, for example, together with the latest information on what is most likely to go wrong with each, based on the organisation's own data.

In short, eBooks aren't "books" - they're a flexible, user friendly means to present information in a clear format. Their niche is probably only temporary until computers end up with screens which are more comfortable to read, whether based on e-ink or other technologies, and lower prices, but until then they have the potential to become ubiquitous in some key applications, and that can give opportunities to the right sort of minds.

(*) The technical stuff. Well, the hardware and embedded software of Sony's cheapest eBook reader are simple and uncluttered. However, as has been the habit for Sony of late, they are let down by abysmal PC software, and dreadful customer service. At the time of writing I haven't yet managed to get the included software working. Responses from the support site have been along the lines of "try re-installing" - AGAIN. A quick search on the web indicates I'm not alone - so it isn't just me being stupid. Luckily the wonderful Calibre (for free publications) and Adobe's Digital rights management software (for purchased books) work flawlessly, and I've now stopped trying to flog that particular dead horse. The other interesting point is that the non-proprietary "EPUB" format works better on Sony's reader than their proprietary "LRF" format - which appears buggy and has some bizarre conventions anyway (such as the entire document repaginating if you zoom in).