Neal Bloom explains why investors focus on their own region. He covers how founders and investors align, what it means to call yourself an angel investor, and how a strong local capital community raises startup quality and strengthens the entire regional ecosystem.
Learn from others, learn from people's misses, gains, and what we'll do different today and tomorrow. And so I'm taking you through a few different lenses. I'm taking you through the lens of founder to funder, which will be the first conversation. And then funder to manager of a fund. So this is, and we'll get to that. Then also taking you through, oh, and with that, What are the kind of the roles and expectations of an angel once you kind of throw that hat on, put it on your LinkedIn saying, "I'm an investor." Okay, what did you just open yourself up to? And what does it actually take all the way to deploying capital? So we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna use storytelling, especially with a lot of these guests today, not just kind of rapid-fire questions, because we learn a lot through people's learnings, through their own synthesis. We're then going to talk a bit about the, from some seasoned entrepreneurs and investors, how they have learned over the years, what are their frameworks for assessing and then identifying and investing, and why they have chosen to hyperfocus on local. Okay, so that's another angle here. There's a lot of different places you can go and invest, right? Why in our own backyard? Why right here where we live? So we'll touch on that as well, and the importance of having a local capital community. What does that actually do for our entrepreneurship community? What does that do for the quality of startups when we actually have domestic capital as well, which we'll talk about.
