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Tag Archives: Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship

Angel Interviews: Ehud Israel and the “funding gap” at Drexel University

Introducing Angel Interviews, a series dedicated to debunking the assumption that entrepreneurs need to look outside of Philadelphia for angel and early stage investment. Every so often we’ll interview a local angel and ask him or her about investment criteria and how to get in contact. If you’re an angel investor that deals primarily with technology companies or you have any suggestions about how we can improve this series drop us a line.

Ehud Israel wasted no time admitting that he was new to angel investing.

The 43-year-old is one of the mentors at Drexel’s Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship, a business incubator that caters exclusively to the Drexel University community, and it was in that role that he decided to invest in one of the Center’s companies: Async Interview.

“There’s a gap in our support [at the Center] of the students in respect to funding, so I’ve been trying to fill that gap,” says Israel. “It just so happens that, as a mentor, I’m in the ground floor at these ideas.”

Now in an operational role at as Async’s CFO and CTO, Israel has also invested in one other company and is keeping his ears open for other deals, though he says he is not actively pursuing companies.

We ask Israel what he looks for in a company, how to get started as an angel investor and the reason for the misperceptions about Philadelphia’s angel community.


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VC Roundup: Angel Venture Fair and Drexel’s new incubator

Welcome to the VC Round-up, where we’ll parse through venture capital news related to Philadelphia-based private equity firms and the companies they fund. Subscribe to the roundup as an email newsletter. If you have any VC-related news to pass along to us, please drop us a line.

DEFINITE READS

The Inky reports on the 12th-annual Angel Venture Fair, held at the Union League last week. The event is described as “speed dating for entrepreneurs” where 125 companies pitched 150 angel investors.

Drexel University will be creating an incubator in Bristol, according to the PBJ. The incubator will inhabit a building formally owned by Rohm and Haas Co. If you remember, Drexel also has an incubator in Camden in addition to the Baiada Center on campus.

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New features for industry social network i-Meet and PhindMe Mobile

phindme-imeet

Two high-profile, Web-based Philadelphia startups each announced more services to their products recently.

Center City-based, event-planning social network i-Meet.com announced today its partnership with PlannerNet, a service aimed at helping its nearly 10,000 member organizations to find, rate and contract for project-based labor.

That move follows a host of new add-ons to PhindMe Mobile, a mobile Web direct-to-consumer advertising company based at Drexel University’s Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship, which came earlier this month, according to a company press release.

The new service offered by i-Meet, the brainchild of 17th and Oregon’s own John Pino, is said to identify professional meeting and event skills that are available worldwide, helping to match planner experience and projects for event organizers. It’s a move Pino hinted at during an interview with Technically Philly in May.

“In this challenging, economic environment, companies are becoming more inclined to staff their events on a project by project basis,” Pino says in a company press release. “By connecting our worldwide social network to PlannerNet, we’re… delivering qualified talent”

PhindMe’s new features are more varied, ranging from native smartphone applications to Twitter functionality.


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