The Skolkovo Business Angels Club (SCBA) met on February 25. The meeting was held in a new, cluster format: pitches by startups were divided into sections which operated simultaneously, with the club’s meeting procedure equally undergoing other amendments. The International Trade Centre hosted the meeting of the business angels club members, which consisted of two sessions: one dedicated to IT projects, the other dedicated to industrial projects which attracted startups operating in the energy and space technologies sector. 5 Skolkovo IT cluster residents became IT section participants: Goods4Cast, Eventos, Intelligent Platforms & Solutions, IstraSoft and GBooking. Four projects were represented in the industrial section: iSkyTracker, a resident of the Space Technologies and Telecommunications cluster, and three residents of the Energy Efficient Technologies cluster: Ultrametr, Malaya Energetika and 4D Energetics. iSkyTracker's director Maxim Shuravlev, talking to business angels Pitches were held both off-line and via video conferencing. The new format implemented by Yevgeny Taubkin, head of the Skolkovo Foundation Investment Service, to be used during the SCBA meetings from this year on envisages 10-minute pitches by each company, following which the startup and the business angels are given 10 minutes for Q&A communication. After this the investors will proceed to discussing the project and share their impressions of the pitch that they were presented without the startupper taking part. Following this, SCBA decides, based on the results of the discussion, whether to continue the dialogue with the business angels regarding each individual project at the current stage of its development. The company which gets a positive response, a preliminary favourable opinion from the investors, has two weeks to fine-tune the investment offer in conjunction with the Skolkovo Foundation Investment Service and refine the scope of its further cooperation with the investors. The novelties were implemented at SCBA by the club members’ request, which they voiced as investors and startuppers were being polled last year. The key problem affecting failed pitches has now become obvious. All of those who have so far not been successful in “currying favour” with business angels, so to speak, keep making the same mistake: what investors wish to hear is an articulate investment offer, and not a detailed coverage of technologies. Whereas the inventors’ turn of mind, their core competences, their professional and life experience, altogether make it far easier and comfortable for them to speak of the specific technological advantages of their achievement. This is naturally true not for all projects: at the February meeting the SCBA members met with some managers who had been perfectly briefed and prepared for making presentations before investors. Head of the start-up acceleration and development programme Alexei Yermolin noted that “we are naturally far from striving to turn engineers into businessmen”. What they rather seek is to ensure rapprochement of both sides’ positions: that of business angels and that of development project engineers. It is precisely for this purpose that the Skolkovo Foundation has developed and implemented a mentorship and acceleration programme for both SCBA business angels and business experts from among the members of the Foundation’s Expert Board, Daniil Osey, Investment Service director, told sk.ru. Skolkovo furthermore offers the Startup Launch Pad special educational programme for the benefit of startups wishing to advance their business competences. One of the startuppers speaking before SCBA was blunt in saying that he personally primarily counts on mentoring support from the business angels in the area of what he described as “assistance with project management”. Several business angels, however, voiced an opinion that this is the job of rather development institutes that could achieve this by conducting similar workshops. Which was in fact precisely what SCBA was busy doing just a day before pitches began. And, moreover, one of yesterday’s participants Emmanuil Kneller, IstraSoft CEO (IT technologies in language learning), said that the workshop held the day before the pitches had been a great help: “Our pitch was successful, we were able to get investors interested, but the best thing was that the investor who actually got interested had himself used the methodology proposed by us in his time”.
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