Where are the angels? The most  complete  list of angel groups in North America is provided by the Angel Resource Institute. A few weeks ago I attended a seminar at UNH where Jeff Sohl was contrasting venture capitalists and angels as drivers of economic development. VCs tend to cluster in a few high-visibility locations while angels are spread out all over, as this list clearly shows. And this list just covers groups we can identify, leaving hundreds of thousands of angels who operate informally unlisted.

If you’d like to contrast this list with VCs you can find a list of members on the National Venture Capital Assn. web site.

Delighted to see Don Dodge quoted in the Economist in an article on Facebook’s purchase of Instagram. Don was an active member of our eCoast Angels Investment Network here in seacoast NH before leaving Microsoft for Google and relocating to California. Don opines that the purchase price of $30 per user is quite reasonable. If you check the online comments, not everyone agrees: “Now this is the kind of nonsense that was all the rage in the pre-2001 new economy days. We know how that bubble ended, now we know where this one is headed.”

Good reading all around and congratulations to Don for becoming such a prominent industry spokesman.

http://www.economist.com/node/21552569

While VC funding is declining both in number of funds and dollar amounts, the number of Angel Investors and the amount they are investing has been increasing significantly. Angels also invest over a much wider geographic area than VCs. Here's what Jeff Sohl at UNH reports:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/unh-center-for-venture-research-u-s-angel-investor-market-on-solid-path-of-recovery-in-2011

VC's are investing more money than they are raising. This situation cannot continue forever says Michael Greeley. Prepared for a drop off in VC funding?

http://www.pehub.com/146778/are-the-lines-starting-to-converge/

Boston Area Angel Groups, Launchpad and Golden Seeds, have been identified as two of the most active angel investing groups in North America last year in the HALO Report, a quarterly study of angel group activity sponsored by The Angel Resource Institute, Silicon Valley Bank and CB Insights. Launchpad, started by Ham Lord over a decade ago, is now the largest Angel Investing Group in the Northeast. Their approach is to concentrate their investing in the Boston Area.

Gold Seeds, started in 2004 in New York to serve the needs of women entrepreneurs and investors, has branches in Boston and in San Francisco, making it the fourth largest angel network in the US; Kudos to Jean Hammond and others for bringing this concept to Boston.