Angel Talks is a video podcast in live-stream mode, where venture investors, business angels and experts in the field of venture investments (analysts, lawyers, mentors and etc.) share their experience with current and future investors and technical entrepreneurs. From now on we will be preparing summaries of the Angel Talks episodes with investors: highlight the main ideas and insights, no room for nonsense :)

Authors and hosts of the podcast: Sergey Belyaev — a venture evangelist, a serial entrepreneur with a 10-years experience, last 6 of which were dedicated to digital marketing and IT-consulting; and Ivan Lomakin — a manager with a 16-year-experience in sales and 11-years-experience in marketing.

Among other things, Sergey recently became an official partner of investclub.vc in Russia, but we will tell about this later. In today’s article, he shared the story and idea of the Angel Talks project.

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How it all started: podcasts about marketing

Ivan and I met in Yekaterinburg a long time ago, where we worked on a joint business. After a while we went separate, he left for Taganrog, and I stayed in Yekaterinburg.

We continued to communicate by phone and discuss many interesting things about marketing. At one point, Ivan said that our conversations are ideal for podcasts. And we tried it — we started recording audio podcasts about marketing for IT companies. We made 16 episodes and thought: it seems interesting and useful to record them and, what’s more important, there are listeners, but the process went a bit slowly. We finished the second podcast season and paused to figure out what to do next. At this time, we somehow accidentally became volunteers of the “Startup Kotiki” project: we helped with the creation and development of the community, optimized the Youtube channel, and generated interesting activities for the community members. This initiative was just then in its infancy.

The “Startup Kotiki” project is organized by Igor Shoifot, a venture investor. Igor is a serial entrepreneur, venture investor and partner of the TMT Investments fund. He’s also Chairman, Board of Directors of Happy Farm incubator, investor of more than 100 startups and a participant of AngelList startup community. Has been living in the US for 25 years.

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Angel Streams evolution in Angel Talks

After some time, we decided to try a Facebook live stream on a startup theme. We did it  —  and got some good feedback. After that, we spent about 8 more broadcasts without any idea or concept, communicated with fellow startups and product specialists. These were just live broadcasts, useful for startups, where we talked, for example, about Product-market-fit, about finding the first customers, and so on. But we had to move on.

At that moment, I came up with the idea to try to make a special season with venture capitalists. Ivan supported the idea. I posted a post on Facebook asking for an intro to some angels or venture capitalists. Dmitry Sutormin (a venture investor and managing partner of the Yellow Rockets fund) responded in the comments and said that he could recommend himself). Having launched the season with venture capitalists, we thought about the name for a long time. In the end, we decided not to bother and make everything easier: since this is a pilot season, then its name is 'Angel Streams'.

We recorded 9 episodes for Angel Streams. By the last episodes we realized that we had grown a lot, the concept began to change. If in the beginning our streams were conducted in the 'investors to startups' format, then in the process more and more interviews were in the 'investors to investors' context. In other words, the focus began to shift and the target audience began to change. As a result, we decided to launch the second season, where we changed the name and idea of the podcast — this is how Angel Talks appeared. To date, we simultaneously announce streams in our personal profiles on Facebook and in the Startup Kotiki group, a little later, we also publish videos in Startup Kotiki's YouTube channel. From now we will also appear in Startup Jedi :)

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Angel Talks guests

While developing the project, we managed to communicate with many experienced investors on the hot topics, for instance:

• Vladimir Gidirim — an angel investor and LP in several VC funds, he has been working in Great Four’s auditing companies for 24 years. Vladimir shared his thoughts about how investors can get access to the best deals.

• Igor Lutz — a venture investor, a partner of The Untitled Ventures fund. Igor has told how an entrepreneur can level up to the venture investor.

• Herman Kalpun — one of the TMT Investment co-founders and strategic directors. During the live-stream, he answered several critical questions, such as: what’s the path of a venture investor, is there a competition for startups and how to become a fund's partner.

• Elena Aster — a venture investor and producer, has 10 year of experience in VC, she has been conducting an active entrepreneurship since 2010, and since 2017 — she has been conducting investment activities in the high-tech field. During the live-stream, we discussed which startups will be of high demand after the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Pavel Cherkashyn — a co-founder and managing partner of Mindrock Capital fund, an investor and an entrepreneur. In this one of our brand new video-interviews, we discussed the topic of scouting, where Pavel told an interesting thing: “If you want to become a successful investor, in the first place, you have to be a successful scout”. Honestly, this is how we came up with the idea of developing a technological scouts’ community, and in the future establish the Scouting Academy.

It shouldn’t go unmentioned that all our issues are unique in structure, mood, character. The most memorable for me was the stream with Pavel Khegai. Pavel is a cool networker, he talked about networking as a fundraising tool. At that time, we were broadcasting in Zoom, anyone could join. And in the middle of the air, Igor Matsanyuk (a venture investor and one of the heroes of the VC Kitchen project at Startup Kotiki) comes in! Igor is famous for being very active and sometimes quite harsh in his criticism of startups. So we decided to give the floor to Igor. He practically started attacking Paul (within the rules, of course). In the context that networking is nonsense and one shouldn’t concentrate on it. It was, of course, tense, but cool!

In the future, we plan to invite more guests. To take even more famous and media-known people, “squeeze out” the insights for investors rather than take just another interview. Perhaps there will be additional video projects for startups about investments and the intricacies of fundraising.

As one of our guests, Elena Aster, told us, our podcasts are somehow special: cozy and, at the same time, very expertized. We communicate freely with the guests, this is not an interview, but a conversation of several people on topics of interest to them. Add me as a friend on Facebook and stay tuned for new broadcasts. See you!