We are pleased to announce a recently redesigned Band website, with a beautiful modern look and feel and several new functionalities. Members can view the calendar of upcoming meetings and register for the Dinner and Second Look on the web site itself. There is a password-protected member login which provides an online directory of the Band membership. To set up your password, go to the home page of the Band’s web site (bandangels.com) and click Member Login. Then click the blue link “Forgot your password?” and enter the email you have on file with BandHQ. This should allow you to set up a personal password. Our ask of you is this: Please login and update your profile in the member directory, indicate in which SiGs you are participating, and mark your industry expertise. We pre-populated the member bios from your membership information form, but this may be outdated. Contact Sonja if you need any help with this. Having this information on-line should help facilitate finding Band members who have the background and experience to help with diligence and be co-investors on deals. One reminder however, a cornerstone of the Band of Angels’ culture is “All for one and one for all”. If you use this on-line system to find co-investors for a deal, you owe the whole Band the same opportunity. So please alert our Deal Manager Shayna or Exec Director Sonja, of any use of this platform in service of diligence on, or syndication of, a potential investment. For many years we deliberately did not have an electronic database. It was a crude way of forcing members to work through BandHQ to contact other members and thus allowed BandHQ to help maintain this key principle of the Band. In adopting the electronic database we turn the maintenance of this key operating principle over to you to help maintain. Please do your part! Also, of course, please keep the Band membership directory, and any and all information behind the member login, confidential.
You can contribute in other ways, too. For the News section, we’d like to encourage you to share news about our portfolio companies, trends in angel investing, send us a picture and writeup about any panels where you are speaking, or summary and pictures of the SiG meetings and other Band events.
This website is a first iteration. We welcome your feedback and suggestions on what else to include on the web site to help you and our entrepreneurs with relevant information about the Band.
One of the benefits of banding together in a Band is that we can establish partnership deals we'd not be able to as individual angels. We have such a partnership, which you should know about, between the Band of Angels and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide any Band funded company with the same benefits given to companies in the Amazon AWS Activate program. Some of these include: choice of either $100,000 in AWS Promotional Credit valid for 1 year or $10,000 in AWS Promotional Credit valid for 2 years; 12 months of AWS Business Support; AWS Activate Toolbox with offers for Amazon Payments and Amazon Marketplace; access to the AWS Technical and Business Essentials web-based (or instructor-led) training ($600 value per course), and other benefits listed here http://bit.ly/aws-band.
We’ve had this program since 2015 and a number of portfolio companies, like Twine Data and NGX Bio, have already taken advantage of it and saved money. We are including this announcement as new information for our recent members and a reminder for the rest. Please contact Sonja for the authorization code to unlock this program.
- Ian