We hosted another Entrepreneurs' Series on Tuesday last week in Raleigh and we focused all of it on raising seed capital. With more new companies sprouting in the region, we are getting asked about sources of seed stage capital more frequently.
So, we decided to tao our network to show just a few of the options available to entrepreneurs. We had almost 200 people register and had three panels:
- Accelerators
- Angels and angel groups
- Founder/CEO stories
We also included some out of town angels and accelerators to fly in from Northern Virginia, DC and Baltimore to participate. In total, we had 13 speakers.
To kick things off in the morning, we had Bob Young, co-founder and former CEO of Red Hat talk about raising capital. I couldn't think of a better person to do this than Bob. First, Red Hat is probably the most successful tech company in our region and Bob was the guy responsible for fund raising during the company's early days. Red Hat's funding came from angel investors, strategic investors (Compaq, IBM, Netscape, Novell, Oracle, SAP and Dell) and from VC firms Benchmark and Greylock.
For those that couldn't join us, check out Joe Procopio's summary. Thanks Joe! He lists out some of the key takeaways.
Missed this one, but like to get on our list for a future invite? Go here.