People First is the Hyde Park Angels podcast dedicated to deconstructing entrepreneurial success into actionable takeaways you can use today. Hyde Park Angels is the most active early-stage investor in Chicago with a commitment to taking a “people-first approach” to investing. By matching our members’ expertise with entrepreneurs’ needs, we help develop top-performing companies that are delivering extraordinary […]
As part of HPA’s efforts to build opportunities for growth and success across our portfolio and our partners, we connect them to one another to drive results. We connected our portfolio company Xaptum with one of our partners, Westcon-Comstor, to do just that. Almost a year later, we spoke with Steve Garrou, EVP of Corporate […]
The Hyde Park Angels “New Investment Series” profiles our most recent investments by examining the investment process and the individual company’s future trajectory from two perspectives: the portfolio company’s CEO and the HPA leader who made the deal happen. This edition focuses on Occasion. Aksh, why did you start Occasion? What problem were you trying […]
When a founding team starts a business, the members have to ask themselves a critical question: how should we make sure they divide the value of the company fairly? There are many ways to do this, but often the simplest is to structure the initial shares as vesting. Vesting shares means an individual does not […]
Cap tables and venture capital go hand-in-hand. Without them, determining ownership, control, and exit returns would be nearly impossible. That’s because a capitalization table is a table that takes all of the shareholders in your business and lays out who owns what, how much each one owns, and what value is assigned to the stock […]
