With a follow-on investment in OneSeventeen Media and an initial investment in College Consortium, the Southwest Angel Network has now made over $1M in cumulative investments since its founding at the beginning of 2016.
College Consortium, led by a highly experienced team, provides tools that allow colleges to offer students more course offerings, allowing students to graduate in a shorter time, at lower cost and with less student debt. College Consortium can be especially impactful for students whose life-changes may have discouraged them from finishing their degrees.
Key elements of the pledge that are most relevant to our angel network are:
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A wonderful story about Beth and Amy, and their work to better the lives of children and youth.
“Beth and Amy had different early childhood experiences. As co-founders, this provides them a unique yin–yang approach to product development. They’re both motivated to build world class mobile apps that help today’s kids have safe access to information at their fingertips for help anytime, anywhere.”
Juan has joined as a Director and will be assisting the Bob in managing the network.
Juan has extensive experience as a Mentor, Startup Investor and Sales Consultant, and is focused on helping early stage companies get to the next level. He particularly enjoys working with B2B SaaS companies, platforms, communications, health tech, beer and social good.
He is passionate about helping teams find customers, listening to their challenges and delivering win-win solutions.
He is currently a Venture Partner at NextGen Venture Partners, and has held executive sales positions at Retreaver and Twilio. Juan has also has contributed in sales and technical areas at seven other companies, including both start-up companies and IBM.
From the desk of Juan Thurman:
I have always been interested in Science and Technology. As a boy, one of my favorite authors was Isaac Asimov. He told fantastic, page turning stories based on what science and technology could one day make possible (and some that has come to pass, even in Asimov’s life time). Of course, the technology was super cool, but more importantly it improved humanity. His robots did the dangerous/hard/mundane tasks humans no longer wanted to do. Self- driving cars were just one part of the automated transportation infrastructure, solar energy check and of course space travel was available to most.
This interest has led me to a fascinating and fulfilling career. From my first job engineering, designing and testing off- road vehicles to make sure their large tires protected sensitive environments like the permafrost; to more recently, leading a team of dedicated professionals selling communication solutions that powered the creation of apps to help depressed patients feel connected,enable municipalities to alert citizens of harmful weather events and more. Most of my career has been in technology sales, bringing education, innovation and efficiency to businesses that needed them. Yes, many deals were straight forward and only lead to incremental cost savings. But, the deals that I found most interesting and motivating were those that made people’s lives better. I can still remember talking to an entrepreneur who asked if he could use cloud communications to better schedule home health aids or another who was connecting teachers, parents and students.
Recently, like many of you through happenstance and luck, I was re-evaluating my career and goals. So, I reached out to a number of people that I admire and respect and had some great conversations. (I encourage you to do the same from time to time). One of the people I spoke to was Bob Bridge, Executive Director at Southwest Angel Network (SWAN). He told me about SWAN and the amazing social impact companies that they have funded. He then invited me to their next pitch dinner and after listening to companies working to reduce food waste, ensure the elderly get to their medical appointments on time, and improve the quality of our drinking water, I joined as an Angel. I have had the opportunity to learn from some great Angels, mentors and supporters as well as some amazing and interesting entrepreneurs.
So when Bob, asked if I would formally help him run and grow SWAN, I of course said yes. There are a great number of entrepreneurs out there who not only want to start a new company, grow that company and become profitable, but also want to positively impact this world we all share. They need our help. That means access to capital, mentoring, guidance and support. Bob, has started an important, vibrant and growing angel network. I hope to help grow the network and support more entrepreneurs who want to make the world better and drive outstanding returns.
From the desk of Bob Bridge:
I recently have attended two Demo Days, which were the final events of multi-week accelerator programs. The start-up teams were well prepared and polished as they gave highly motivational and somewhat theatrical three-minute Demo pitches. At one of the events, up-beat rock music blared as each successive speaker rushed onto stage with a huge smile and excitedly made eye contact with as many in the audience as possible. Their businesses all sounded so high-energy and wonderful!
One of the Demo-day events also allowed investors to have ten-minute, private one-on-one meetings with the companies prior to the demo-day pitches. At these meetings there were no theatrics, only open and frank discussions about the status of the business, their successes to date and the challenges they face. These meetings were substantial and helpful.
It was interesting to me that in many cases, for a given company, it felt like a different company had been in the one-on-one and in the demo pitches. The demo pitches glossed over the real-world challenges and risk factors.
I have the same reaction to business plan competitions for university teams. Well-rehearsed theater, with only a partial connection with reality.
The Southwest Angel Network has invested in ScribeSense, who has achieved significant revenue for their innovative and patented EdTech technology.
The company makes existing paper assessments more meaningful for teachers and students. By auto-grading handwritten, paper responses (not just bubble sheets), ScribeSense allows teachers to spend time using data to drive instruction, rather than spend hours grading.Teachers save hours of time which improves teacher retention, students and parents receive immediate feedback, and school administrators discover data beyond multiple choice.
See the list of networks.
The Southwest Angel Network is the only network in Texas focused on social-impact companies, and one of a handful in the US with that focus. In the 2nd quarter we had 25 companies apply for funding, including 10 from Austin, 10 from Dallas and Houston, 3 from California, one from Colorado and one from the Netherlands. Our angels reside in both Austin and Houston.
An Innovation Partner is an organizations that supports commercialization, entrepreneurship, and translation of National Science Foundation funded technologies into the market. Partners serve as a resource or sounding board for the research teams.
One of the social-impact areas of interest for the Southwest Angel Network is the environment. Therefore we are pleased to have been invited to become an Innovation Partner for the Nano Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) Research Center at Rice University. The objective of NEWT is to develop new technologies to treat industrial/oil & gas wastewater in a more efficient, sustainable manner, and to make clean, safe water available to the millions of individuals who lack access to it by the use of innovative, low-cost, sustainable approaches.
Rice leads a consortium of four universities: Rice, Arizona State, Yale University, and University of Texas (El Paso) for the NEWT program, which is expected to receive $37 million from NSF over 10 years.