Category Archives: News

Members of the Southwest Angel Network were mentors in the recently completed Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Superstars Competition. This program helps students at five Austin Title 1 high schools to develop start-up company business plans and presentation skills.

At the recent city-wide final competition, our network awarded the Social-Impact award to Maria Hernandez and Lizett Abrego, pictured below. They are students at the Travis Early College High School.  

At our May 9th dinner pitch event, in addition to hearing the normal company pitches, Maria and Lizett will be presenting us their business plan for their company “Hope”.

Furthermore, our network has raised a college scholarship fund through the recent Amplify Austin giving day, and we will present the scholarship to Maria and Lizett at the meeting.

The Southwest Angel Network is not your ordinary angel network. We care deeply about social-impact and we strongly support diverse management teams. And yes, we also seek to make a return on our investments.

Bob Bridge, the angel network’s Executive Director, has been recognized nationally as a leader in social impact investing. Bob recently served on a Social Impact panel at the recent national ACA  Leadership Conference in Houston. Bob has also been invited to moderate a panel discussion on “The Growth of Impact Investing” program at the ACA’s April national Summit in Boston.

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.

Key elements of the pledge that are most relevant to our angel network are:

• Taking a self-defined percentage of pitch meetings, starting at 10%, from women, minorities, and people who identify as LGBTQ to help open up new deal sources
• Mentoring women, minorities and people who identify as LGBTQ
• Encouraging portfolio companies and their boards to take the pledge

See more details

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.”

Women Entrepreneurs Spotlight: OneSeventeen Media

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.