startupmania

Yaron Samid, founder of Pando Networks and the man behind TechAviv’s start-up conventions is launching a new Angel club appropriately named TechAviv Angels. This Angel club, however, has a twist.

According to reports on TechAviv’s website, Samid has managed to recruit to this club a veritable who’s who of start-up and venture capital celebrities: Incredimail founder Ofer Adler, Yair Goldfinger, one of the founders of ICQ and Jeff Pulver who never seems to get tired. So far, so good.

Unlike other Angel clubs, this club seems to boast a handsome number of start-up founders who are currently running their own start-up companies, and are trying to recruit venture capital investments for their own private companies, and must also be interested in investing some of their own money in other people’s projects.

This might sound strange, or it could be the begining of a new model to come out of Israel, but if you sign up to TechAviv Angels’ upcoming November 24th event, you could try and raise some money out of adap.tv CEO Amir Ashkenazi, OutBrain’s CEO Yaron Galai, Vringo CEO Jon Medved, Yedda CEO Avichai Nissenbaum and a long list of other start-up all-stars, a great majority of which fight their own battles in the venture capital fund raising trenches to bring their companies to a preliminary operational profit, pay their employees or stand out among the competition.

We’re not exactly clear on whether or not an active CEO of a start-up company is even allowed to invest in a different start-up, but the concept behind TechAviv Angels offers a few significant advantages. If these web 2.0 company founders will actually end up investing their time and money, and you don’t have problem revealing your new initiative to the the CEOs of other internet companies, then you have the potential to pitch to a group of experienced entrepreneurs who have seen a great deal of the internet landscape, searching for elusive profit model and the never ending game of catch-up with ever-evolving technologies.

A vast majority of these entrepreneurs are masters at their craft, whether it be marketing, media or fund raising. Some have even managed to achieve impressive exits with other companies. These are people who have earned the lucrative degree “Founder of a VC-fund supported company”, a rough modern equivalent to medieval knighthood. Each of these can greatly assist an up and coming entrepreneur, help him fine tune his presentation or even introduce him to new potential investors.

Aside from the impressive list of “internet celebrities”, Samid promises that the Angel club event will also be visited by representatives of many venture capital funds, among them representatives from Benchmark, Gemini, Genesis, Sequoia and many others. We’re not sure what the representatives will be looking for in an internet Angel event, and if they are really afraid of missing “the next big thing” that may have slipped through the dozens of their employees, but these days it seems these internet start-up events are the place where one should dress nicely (for the Facebook album), speak to nice people (a.k.a potential Facebook friends) and polish one’s networking skills (for the next event, of course). A presence of the venture capital funds is sure, for one thing, to boost up the level of hors d’œuvres.

This has just been a long winded way of saying that Yaron Samid is a great guy, with an incredible energy that is well known around the world for his start-up events. If you need any more incentive to sign up for his event – it’s free.

And even if you don’t get that investment from that venture-capital-investor-comma-blogger or angel/bubble company CEO, you will still represent your own ideas and world-changing initiatives in front of other people. Ones who don’t sleep in the same bed as you, ones you don’t meet every day, and, most importantly, ones you haven’t bored to tears with your repeating these ideas over and over. The event promises to be a great time, a wonderful experience, and a lesson every one should go through.

Translated by Itai Rosenbaum