iVenture Tuesday

iVenture Tuesdays is a series of speaker events put together by Informatics Ventures (at Edinburgh University) for the benefit of the startup community. Tonight's event "What investors really want" compared two sources of investment.

On the left is John Waddell, CEO of Scotlands oldest and largest Angel Investment group, Archangels Informal Investment Ltd. These groups are made up of wealthy individuals who invest some of their wealth in small companies. Archangels are investors in one of the companies I work with.

On the right, Sandy McKinnon of Pentech Ventures, an Edinburgh based Venture Capital (VC) firm. VCs raise money from commercial investors (such as pension funds) and invest it in young companies. Sandy have met a couple of times, and we know a lot of the same people as we both used to work at consultancy Scientific Generics (although not at the same time).

They are both really interesting speakers - so it was a pretty good event. It was also my first time inside the "Egg" at Napier's Craiglockhart campus - it's quite a cool lecture theatre and looks like a metal egg from the outside!