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2015 in Review: Our Top 3 Entrepreneurial Resource Series

2015 in Review: Our Top 3 Entrepreneurial Resource Series We launched the official Hyde Park Angels blog in late January with one central goal — to demystify the early-stage investment process for entrepreneurs so they could successfully navigate the process and build their companies. Since then, we’ve broken down difficult concepts like term sheets, option pools, and […]

December 15, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff

Understand Venture Debt

Entrepreneurs need capital to support their businesses, but they often think venture capital is the only way despite a number of other options. One of those options is venture debt, which startups can qualify for once they’ve raised a venture capital round. We spoke with Bailey Moore, Vice President of Wintrust Ventures, about how venture […]

December 8, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff

Build a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign in 5 Steps

As an early-stage entrepreneur, your first instinct might be to go straight to angels or venture capital firms to help accelerate you from the idea or prototype stage to a successful launch. However, that can be a losing strategy with investors looking to see market traction of some kind and measure your product-market fit. At […]

December 1, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff

Understanding Your Term Sheet Options

Up until now, our ongoing term sheet series has focused on how to read an equity term sheet and a convertible debt term sheet. But before you learn to read term sheets, you need to know what your financing options are. Specially, as an entrepreneur, what kind of deal structure makes the most sense for your […]

November 24, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff

Build and Maintain Strong Advisor, Board Member, and Investor Relationships

We launched the final program in our Entrepreneurial Education Series, “How to Find Advisors, Board Members, and Investors,” on November 12th with our partner 1871 and sponsor The Wall Street Journal. The event brought together powerhouse entrepreneurs and investors Bruce Barron (Co-Founder & Partner, Origin Ventures), Corey Ferengul (CEO, Undertone), Constance Freedman (Founder & Managing […]

November 17, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff

How to Read a Convertible Debt Term Sheet

Register for “How to Work with Your Advisors, Board Members, and Investors” on November 12 at 6:00 pm at 1871 to learn more about this and other topics on our blog. As an entrepreneur raising capital, you have many options on what type of round to pursue: equity, safe, or even convertible debt. Especially in […]

November 10, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff

How Option Pools Work

In the first post of our cap table series, we broke down a cap table into its most basic parts and defined each one. As a quick refresher, cap tables all of the shareholders in your business and lay out who owns what, how much each one owns, and what value is assigned to the […]

November 3, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff

Find and Work with Advisors, Board Members, and Investors

Join Hyde Park Angels at 1871 on Thursday, November 12 from 6:00 pm — 8:00 pm to learn from the expert investors, executives, and board members behind Chicago’s biggest exits and most successful investments. Discover how startups like Grubhub, Answers.com, and others found the advisors, board members, and investors that helped them drive growth and achieve success, […]

October 27, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff

How to Get an Angel Investment

To really succeed at building relationships with angel groups and getting investments from them, you have to understand how they work. If you match an angel group’s investment criteria, the next step is to go through their process. But for a lot of entrepreneurs, that process is opaque. While some angel groups might provide you […]

October 20, 2015 By Michael Sachaj

Pitching Lessons from Applying to Shark Tank

Note: Since their successful pitch on Shark Tank, the entrepreneurs of Packback have evolved the startup to seize greater market opportunity. Packback is now a learning platform powered by proprietary artificial intelligence that both quantifies and improves college students’ critical thinking skills. The Packback story nicely illustrates the value of a great team of entrepreneurs […]

October 13, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff