FKA 😇 Advice, Connections and Funding for NZ Startups

Newsletter ➢ ᴀFKAғ•2018#45

21/12/2018


	21 December 2018 #45

FKA's back-office is still operating in the last week before Xmas. Thank you to all FKAngels and co-investors for delivering funds and docs in good time so that FKA Nominees Limited can close those two rounds.

We always call for more engagement from our startups. Kami founders Hengjie and Alliv took this literally and got engaged.

Best wishes from all of us at FKA

However, that engagement did not get in the way of continued customer engagement with now well over five million users, nor did it get in the way of closing a US$1M round just before Xmas. One for your stockings.

Kami press in NZBusiness «A revolution in the classroom». Thanks to David Russell in San Francisco, our Investor Rep for Kami.

At the close of the year, it feels great to close the Moxion round at just over NZ$1.9M. With that, have a great Xmas and summer break, all our founders, angels and partners.

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FKAngel Chris can really fly, has more wing power than most. His business Auckland Seaplanes transports tourists and flightless birds. He has just expanded his business and is now also flying from Waiheke. Also, he is our Investor Rep for StretchSense.

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Newsletter ➢ ᴀFKAғ•2018#44

14/12/2018

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	14 December 2018 #44

Tuesday 18 December 2018, 18:30 at The Flagship

All partners, founders and Angels, get your $66 ticket ☞ here . Numbers are limited for this boutique venue. Be there, it will be a great night!

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At the end of 2018, this is FKA's 16x85 portfolio matrix. Ian has backed all 16 startups, closely followed by Chris, Heath, Josh and Rudi who are backing 15. FileInvite has the most nominee investors with 44, then Wherewolf 40, Moxion 39, the average is 27 investors per startup.

At the end of 2018, we have clocked up 1175 ADI sessions since we started this initiative in 2013. A proud result! Not all founders like what we tell them but most of them appreciate our frank advice and helpful connections. Sadly, we are seeing only modest participation from other angel groups.

This is about helping #KIWIstartups, not hogging deal flow!

Welcome aboard, Graeme! He has cleared the FKA Veto Gate without incident and that makes the last mug shot to be added to our list of Active Angels fka.nz/angels for this year, a nice round number of 50!

Tinsel the tree, the bra or moxion to Tinseltown? Just in time for the silly season that is so much about gifting, we bring you Debra's musings of last year, still just as relevant in 2018.

«My husband has never bought me a bra… »

Reading about Peter's deed has inspired our CCH. Rudi will put an investment voucher into the stockings of his kids for them to invest alongside any FKA investment in 2019. This should add extra fire to the already lively dinner table conversations about startups.

Technically all will be done under Rudi's normal investment vehicle.

Agtech is one form of hitech in NZ. Peter Wren-Hilton, Dean Tilyard and Vic Crone dig this sector and report from their trip to the Agtech Nexus Europe conference in Dublin.

Hot and sticky! Our Hot Lime Labs co-investor Brent Ogilvie aka Pacific Channel is, like all angel investors, looking for stickiness in every business. With Engender he has taken that into a different direction with great success. Read all about it!

Steph lives in Dunedin but prefers to hang with the Wellington Angels. Some say she is a Taniwha, others say she is an Angel. Like a Taniwha, she hijacked a recent FKA LinkedIn post to unashamedly promote a startup all about safety, particularly around forklift trucks.

Funny how investor and founder can look alike... ☞ LinkedIn

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Newsletter ➢ ᴀFKAғ•2018#43

7/12/2018

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	7 December 2018 #43

Tuesday 18 December 2018, 18:30 @ The Flagship

Thanks to party animal and hospo director extraordinaire Paul Trotter.

All partners, founders and angels get your $66 ticket ☞ here. Numbers are limited for this boutique venue. Be there it will be a great night!

We dug up this old 2016 FKA Xmas video, no dancing, a little dark.

At this point, a big THANK YOU is due to our sponsors who have hosted all our pitch nights throughout this year, especial KPMG who has hosted most of them. Also, Potentia hosted us with a sabrage of the sexes.

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Graeme Thomson has a day job in Wellington with alternative asset managers Morrison&Co and he is moonlighting with MIG our angel partners in Manawatu. Not enough! He has talked with Jai, Ian and Charlie about Santa and how FKA do things. All feel there is a good fit. The editor is delighted to have a Veto Gate fit for Xmas!

As you know, our Veto Gate is about lifting the Santa hat on new applicants to make sure we don't bring any unwanted reputational risk or otherwise onto the group. If you know of any reasons why Graeme should not join, now is the time to speak up.

Please notify the Board in confidence.

Last week we said the Moxion.io round was looking to be oversubscribed. This week we can confirm the $1.2M target has been well exceeded with now $1.8M of commitments. The Board and shareholders are delighted with this strong level of support, and the company will accept the extra money. Awesome result!

CEO Hugh and Exec Chair Nigel are already back in Hollywood for promising meetings with several of the big content producers that have recently entered the film industry and are driving big changes.

Diligence on Geo AR Games, Kademi and FormuslLabs is still alive but not likely to close before Xmas. FormusLabs has only just started, Kademi has been held back travel, and GAG is waiting for further progress from Chinese investors.

Thank you, Uli, Ralf and Debra, and your respective teams, for hanging in there. Once again, proof that true angels do their best work over the festive season.

Just in time for Xmas news from one of our founders, "We've got our reactor nearly ready [...] to get the first run in around Christmas time. Here is our PIG (pre-industrial generator) being loaded inside the container. That was last week [... and] a photo of our gasifier which will turn the wood into a usable gas to feed the PIG. Exciting times :)"

PIG, not turkey this Xmas!

The other day a dialogue on LinkedIn

Hi Rudi I am looking for an investor, But I think the Angel investor should be call vulture, angel is an bs con, and a complete miss use of Angel, can you explain what Angels do?? Suck the life out of the inventor!

You can see from my profile that I'm an angel investor so I'm unsure what you're trying to achieve by going into a tirade about angel investors before you know me.

I agree that I do not know you! I was referring to the use of the word "Angel" I think it conjures up the idea that you are helping people because you are such an Angle, when in actual fact Angle investors are all about helping themselves! you may be the exception, so why use the term Angel? It would be like me saying I am a god designer. Forgive me if I have offended you!

Pivots, some love them, some loathe'em. "Before dominating their respective spaces, these companies looked very different from what they are known for today. Check out their stories." CB Insights

Some of the tech that we get excited about as investors can have negative social impact. Mobile phones may be good for those at either end of the conversation but they can be bad for others in the room.

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Newsletter ➢ ᴀFKAғ•2018#42

30/11/2018

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	30 November 2018 #42

Congrats to Debra and her formidable DD Team who have landed themselves a great job just before Xmas when many others are thinking of winding down. 18 YES votes of 21 cast as at 21:00 last night or 85% of FKA's Voting Angels in support of progress to DD, a strong mandate.

☞ Here again their pitch video of you've missed it last week.

Tim and Josh are FKAngels and Ambit co-founders. Their round has progressed well. They had to hire Bruno to count the incoming commitments. Sadly, no DD report is available from the lead investor to make this a syndicated co-investment opportunity, also the round is nearly full. Some FKAngels are investing directly. Still, Tim or Josh would be very happy to talk to individual FKAngels.

Ash vs Evil Dead was the first hit series made with Moxion. Then came Warner's blockbuster production The Meg. Then FKA stepped in as lead investor and helped the motley crew raise $1.5M in 2017 to take on Hollywood. More progress but with a burn that called for more money in 2018. This $1.2M round is now oversubscribed!

FKA Nominee investors are taking up 320% of their collective rights. That is a great testament to FKAngels writing follow-on cheques for their portfolio companies. Thanks also to our local syndication partners EA, MIG, AngelHQ, AIM, and our Aussie friends, the Brisbane Angels.

The CEOs of our portfolio companies have a measure of crazy which is good. Ben from StretchSense is a perfect example. See for yourself!

Note the seemingly shy man in the background, it's our Ralf Muller.

Our Xmas Party will be held on 18 December from 18:30 as is normal for our pitch nights, only this will not be an ordinary pitch night. Check out the routine that Garth, Charlie, Jai, Rudi and Josh have rehearsed for the occasion. A Board that seemingly puts no foot wrong.

$99 for all that want to be touched by an angel and discounted to $66 for enchanted angels, founders and partners. A boutique venue in Wynyard Quarter, hence numbers are limited. Don't hang around, email rb@fka.nz for payment instructions to secure your place. ☞ tiny.cc/xmas-party

Haha, so Jackie in her other life... she is not sprinting but she runs the ecentre which in turn runs a new Sprint programme in 2019. They are taking a leaf from the FKA playbook – offering this programme for no fees, no equity, thanks to foundation partners Callaghan Innovation and Massey University. Cool! A few other FKAngels have already caught up with her, if you're interested, catch her, she doesn't run fast. Interested founders give her a yell too. Jackie.Young@ecentre.org.nz

AANZ Chair, John O'Hara has bigger wings than most as he is also an avid aerial pilot. He knows a thing or two about runways. His roundup for the year is full of interesting news from the summit earlier this month and other stuff. No, that is not John in the picture.

Please give generously to our tiny.cc/help-santa appeal

Drinks and canapés at the offices or sun deck of EY on Takutai Square in Auckland on Wednesday 5 December at 1700.

Kindly RSVP to Karen This week with her correct email!

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Newsletter ➢ ᴀFKAғ•2018#41

23/11/2018

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	23 November 2018 #41

Debra brought along Ju Zhang on Tuesday night and this is his pitch. The team at FormusLabs were super efficient, having their video already submitted before Tuesday night. Consequently, the DD Vote is well underway, 13 votes already cast. The GO/NO-GO decision is not far!

Enke was one of the three female Angels in the Dirty Dozen that founded Flying Kiwi Angels in 2014. When she left us to do an MBA in the US, Arron took over her portfolio and her angelic role. Standing on the shoulders of giants or walking alongside growing giants, both are a great honour. All the best to Enke on her onward journey!

Sadly, the full article sits behind the Wall Street Journal paywall.

Lawrence up in Whangarei passed the Veto Gate without any skeletons surfacing in his cupboard. Consequently, our CCH welcomed him aboard as a Flying Kiwi earlier in the week. This was his enthusiastic response:

"Marvelous! As my first official act, I am going to be teaching six two-hour sessions at Kamo high school today and tomorrow about the need for technology aware artists."

Centrality is all about blockchain and is put on an accelerator to grow its app ecosystem. They are leveraging Lightning Lab know-how and have hired can-do man Jeff Mann to run it.

Learn more about it, Tue 4 Dec 2018 @ 1800 in Auckland. Pls RSVP!

Āhau / A decentralised digital identity platform / CarbonClick / A turnkey solution for carbon offsetting / CentralPlace / Your social shared economy platform of the future / Cinema Logic / Optimizing the theatrical distribution supply chain / City On / More fun at travellers' destinations / Pocket / A social bank account / Yabble / DIY collaborative platform for research /

Yabble didn't stop after we stopped DD, they are now incorporating BC tech. Some may remember CarbonClick, Jan and Paul impressed us at ADI back in July.

Your Chief Cat Herder has battled with a bigger cat than usual over the last few days. All FKAngels can be reached by an email consisting of their first and second name on the fka.nz domain. So far, so good.

After angels reported missing emails, he went out hunting and turned up a rogue spam filter at the fka.nz domain. All fixed now but some of you may have received a confusing backlog of emails as a consequence.

Funny but not surprising to many, rb@fka.nz was flagged as the top spammer on the fka.nz domain.

When recording the 2018 Xmas song the Board also recorded this one. We hope you like it! If you do, like it on LinkedIn ?

The ecentre aka Jackie is inviting you all to this talk of MYOB's resident futurist Keran McKenzie. Contrary to popular belief, he will not be talking about the future of ironing nor will he give styling advice. Check out the B:Hive coworking space on the North Shore and hear him speak.

☞ Read more and register here.

Drinks and canapés at the offices or sun deck of EY on Takutai Square in Auckland on Wednesday 5 December at 1700.

Kindly RSVP to Karen This week with her correct email!

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Newsletter ➢ ᴀFKAғ•2018#45

21 December 2018 #45

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Newsletter ➢ ᴀFKAғ•2018#44

14 December 2018 #44

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Newsletter ➢ ᴀFKAғ•2018#43

7 December 2018 #43

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Please notify the Board in confidence.

PIG, not turkey this Xmas!

Newsletter ➢ ᴀFKAғ•2018#42

30 November 2018 #42

Newsletter ➢ ᴀFKAғ•2018#41

23 November 2018 #41

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