CES 2020 Zahava Stroud of Angel Launch
You're listening to Trade Show Live On the Road, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors and trade show industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries from healthcare to consumer products and everything in between. The podcast is a production of the Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. And now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live. Janet (00:28): We're at CES 2020 looking ahead to another exciting decade of innovation and consumer electronics development. However, you can't do it without money. So with me right now is the founder of Angel Launch, Zahava Stroud. Zahava welcome to Trade Show Live at CES 2020. Zahava (00:50): Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. Janet (00:52): Now we're on the first day of the show for us, which is Tuesday. However, Zahava you've been busy; you've already done a number of things at CES. So tell me a little bit about Angel Launch and what you were up to yesterday. Zahava (01:06): Sure. So our website is angellaunch - l a u n c h - .com and we are a leading producer of investment forums, summits and networking events in Silicon Valley. We produce events almost every week connecting startups to investors from around the world. They consist of networking receptions, hitch nights, demo showcases, venture forums, and one of our most popular ones is called backyard capital, where we do a monthly reception in a private home in a very elite area of Silicon Valley where we get 150 startups and investors for informal networking. The goal of these events has been to connect investors to promising startups through deal-making and many startups from around the world have received millions in funding. Yesterday we produced an annual conference at CES; we do every year for over 10 years, called Silicon Valley Funding Summit. And it's a one day conference where we bring in startups from around the world. We bring in investors ranging from millions to a hundred million in funds looking for promising startups. We do a full day of networking, pitching and a demo showcase was very successful. The startups met a lot of great investors and in fact serves told me that they now have been funded from our past events, which is very exciting. Janet (02:26): Oh, we love hearing about people getting money. Now she may sound like it's got a singular focus, consumer electronics, but really we've got everything here from the health tech to virtual reality to toys and games and all kinds of silly stuff to very, very serious things. I'm curious as a Angel Launch person putting together people who have ideas with people who can fund them, are you agnostic to, you don't really care what kind of business it is or are you in any particular area? Zahava (03:01): So the great thing is that what we do is we produce live events. We don't actually invest. We connect startups to accredited investors and we cover all markets. In the last two months we get a FinTech event. We did quite a few on health tech, life science and medical devices, automotive and connected cars, enterprise and consumer applications, AI, deep tech, machine learning. We cover all markets. And what we found is that there's such a huge community of people traveling to the Bay area who don't live there, that we can do events almost every week and we can get several hundred people, those startups and investors who attend, but at least 40% don't live in the Bay area. They're just traveling through for meetings or deals, so we're a great resource for them to meet other people. Janet (03:49): Tell me about the investing or the vetting of the investors. Do you require that ultimately they invest in something? How do you prove that they have the money they say they have to fund people? Zahava (04:03): so we don't do rigorous due diligence since we're an event producer. What we do is we ask investors and we rely on th