Job Creation, Angels and Entrepreneurs

We know from US Census data that newly formed businesses are the prime job creators in the US Economy.  The Kaufman Foundation recently released a new study that confirms this fact (“The Importance of Young Firms for Economic Growth,” Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneurship Policy Digest, September 25, 2014).  They concluded “New businesses account for nearly all net new job creation…”  Read the report here.

Here are the data.  The blue line is the net job creation by young firms.  The red and yellow lines are net job creation by companies six years old and older. At best, the net new job creation by older companies is zero, and in some years, less than zero.

The implication of these data is that one of the most important steps a community interested in economic growth can take is to create a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem.  One facet of that ecosystem is the availability of risk capital for early-stage growth businesses.  Angels typically provide that capital.

Some Boise angels have been investing together for nearly eight years through “angel funds.”  Angel funds are companies formed for the specific purpose of making early-stage investments.  Three have been formed in the Treasure Valley.  Collectively they have invested $2 million in 20 local companies.

One measure of impact is job creation.  As of December 31, 2014 these 20 companies have created 330 jobs since we made our investments.  This is a significant positive impact on our economy. If, for example, the jobs created averaged only $30,000 per year (I suspect, but don’t know that it is much higher), that’s an annual impact in the Treasure Valley of nearly $10 million, not counting multiplier effects. 

Also important are the sales of these companies.  In 2014 the total sales of all companies in the portfolios was approximately $185 million. 

Improving the entrepreneurial ecosystem is not a quick fix.  It takes time to have an impact. Here’s a table of the jobs created by these companies:

Year    Cumulative

            Jobs Created

2010               25

2011               66

2012               109

2013               208

2014               330                       

It's clear to me.  If you want to create more jobs, increase the number of start-ups.  One roadblock to doing this is capital.  We don't have enough early-stage capital in Idaho.  

A number of dedicated folks are working to increase the capital available. Jessica Whiting of Startup Grind arranged for Scott Kupor, Managing Partner of renowned Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesson Horowitz to come to Boise in early March, 2015.  Brad Bertoch, CEO of Salt Lake-based Wayne Brown Institute has brought its programs to Idaho to help connect Idaho companies to Utah angels and venture capitalists.  And the Idaho Technology Council has had an initiative almost since its founding to increase investment capital in the state.

While all these efforts are good and much appreciated, there is a simple public policy step that would directly impact the availability of startup capital. That step is to give a state income tax credit for equity investments in startup companies. At least 18 states and all of Canada does so.

For example, "Minnesota's Angel Tax Credit provides a 25-percent credit to investors or investment funds that put money into startup companies focused on high technology, new proprietary technology, or a new proprietary product, process or service in specified fields. The maximum credit is $125,000 per person, per year ($250,000 if filing jointly). The credit is refundable. Residents of other states and foreign countries are eligible.” (Quoted from their web site.)

How does an angel tax credit work? It’s simple. An angel makes an equity investment in a startup and receives a reduction in his or her state income taxes equal to some percentage of the investment. In Minnesota’s case, it’s a 25% credit. Minnesota is so committed to this, the tax credit is refundable. That is, an investor with no Minnesota tax due can get a refund equal to 25% of his or her investment, subject to the maximums. This means if I invest $100,000 into a qualifying Minnesota company, the state of Minnesota will send me a check for $25,000. The practical effect is I receive a $100,000 interest in the Minnesota company for a net $75,000 investment.

What do the taxpayers of Minnesota get out of this? They get a more robust startup economy, which will increase jobs, provide opportunity to its citizens, and ultimately increase taxes paid by those companies and their employees to the state of Minnesota.

An angel investment tax credit is an elegantly simple means of stimulating investment in our Idaho companies. The free market makes the investment decision. His or her tax savings increases the investor’s available capital. The company gets the investment. Our citizens get the jobs. Our state gets the tax revenue once the company begins to grow.

The Idaho legislature has flirted with this over the last few years.  I hope next year they will enact some type of credit that will favorably impact the availability of capital to our state's entrepreneurs.
 

If not a business plan, then what?

I have been discussing the Lean Startup movement in my recent columns. The movement says that business ideas are based in testable assumptions, and that the first task of the entrepreneur is to test and refine the assumptions; NOT to write a business plan.  This is somewhat heretical as for the last fifty years we thought that the business plan was the first step on the journey to launching a business.

So, how might we organize these assumptions and test them if we are going to do this rather than craft a business plan?  Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur suggest an answer in their book Business Model Generation.  According to them, “a business model describes…how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value [emphasis mine].”

Their research revealed nine building blocks to describe the business model (definitions are quoted from the book):

1.  Customer Segments. The different groups of people or organizations an enterprise aims to reach and serve.

2.  Value Proposition. The bundle of products and services that create value for specific Customer Segments. 

3. Channels. How a company communicates with and reaches its Customer Segments to deliver a Value Proposition.

4. Customer Relationships. The type of relationships a company establishes with specific Customer Segments.

5. Revenue Streams. The cash a company generates from each Customer Segment.

6. Key Resources.  The most important assets required to make the business model work.

7. Key Activities. The most important things a company must do to make its business model work.

8. Key Partners. The network of suppliers and partners that make the business model work.

9. Cost Structure. Describes all the costs incurred to operate the business model. 

Osterwalder and Pigneur combine these nine building blocks into what they call the Business Model Canvas.  They put the canvas in the public domain.  You can download it at http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/business_model_canvas_poster.pdf

The directors and entrepreneurs at Venture College have found this model incredibly helpful as a way to organize our thinking about a particular venture.  Over a period of several months the entrepreneurs tackle each building block by writing down their assumptions, and then testing those assumptions, primarily by interviewing prospective customers. 

To date, our entrepreneurs in the first cohort of Venture College have generated 480 assumptions about their business models.  They have conducted 121 customer interviews and rejected more than half of their assumptions as invalid. 

For example, one of our entrepreneurs believed that there would be a profitable market for an insectarium in Boise.  In the language of the Business Model Canvas, she believed there existed Customer Segments that would Value a visit to an insectarium sufficiently to allow her to make a profit.  What she learned through talking with prospective customers in the various segments is lots of people thought it was a cool idea, but very few were willing to pay the entrance fee (Revenue Stream) such that revenues would be higher than costs (Cost Structure). 

Rather than write a lengthy business plan discussing all the segments, she was able to quickly talk with enough possible segments to learn her idea wouldn’t work.  And, finding this out before she raised the million dollars it would take to create such a facility saved her from huge losses. 

The Screening Committee chair for the Boise Angel Alliance is considering modifying the application process to ask the entrepreneurs to use the Business Model Canvas as a way of applying for funding.  The angels know there are no sure things in startups.  But if an entrepreneur could lay out his or her assumptions and then present the evidence he or she has accumulated to validate those assumptions, it might help the angels improve their investment decision making.

Take a look at the Business Model Canvas as an alternative to writing an exhaustive (and likely very wrong) business plan. Search online for “Business Model Canvas” and you’ll find a great deal of information about this new way of planning for startups.

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Kevin Learned is the Director of Venture College at Boise State University (http://venturecollege.boisestate.edu/) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Boise Angel Alliance (http://www.boiseangelalliance.org/).

 

Test your business model with a minimum viable product

Stanford Professor Steve Blank says “a startup is a temporary organization in search of a repeatable, scalable, profitable business model” (steveblank.com). You may recall from my last column that he believes an initial business plan is a series of unproven assumptions, and that the entrepreneur’s initial task is to test those assumptions quickly and cheaply.

He sees this happening in two stages:  (1) customer interviews and (2) bringing minimum viable products to the market place.  Both are designed to gain feedback from those who might purchase the product or service. 

In the first stage the entrepreneur interviews people who may be able to give feedback on the assumptions such as potential customers, suppliers, and channel partners.  As data is collected from the interviews, the assumptions are refined until the entrepreneur believes she has validated all the assumptions in the business model.

In the second stage the entrepreneur further tests the business model by offering the market place an actual product or service, but the minimum (the “minimum viable product”) necessary to find out if the market will pay for the product and how the customers will use it.  In other words, it is a mistake to try to bring a full-featured product to the market before learning what features the market values.  And the best way to learn this is to bring out a modest model.

Steve Jobs was a master at this.  Think back to the first iPod, iPhone, or iPad and the iterations since they were released.  These early versions had just enough features to learn if the market were interested. Then Apple could watch how the products were used, and modify them accordingly.

We use this approach at Venture College.  For all fall the student-entrepreneurs have been out interviewing prospective customers.  As they gained insight from potential customers they modified their assumptions about their business model—in some cases radically.

Several of the entrepreneurs in our first cohort are beginning to bring modest products or services to the market, still in a test mode.  For example, one of our entrepreneurs has a passion for teaching financial responsibility to teenagers. Through her interviews she learned that teenagers want to know how to afford to move out of home when they are ready to go to college.  But teenagers don’t have the funds to pay for such knowledge. 

Further interviews with the parents of teenagers, led her to the insight the parents are also interested in how their children can successfully move out of home when the time is right, and at least some parents are willing to pay for this information.

So now she is creating her service, a seminar to teach financial responsibility to teenagers.  Initially she is producing a low-cost brochure that sets forth the content of her seminar. The brochure is the minimum viable product. She will use the brochure to try to obtain paying customers for her seminar.  Should sufficient customers sign up, she will then proceed to develop the seminar itself.

In the local angel community there is wide acceptance of the notion that an early stage company is an experiment in search of a repeatable, scalable and profitable business model.  The local angels often fund companies just as they are ready to bring the initial version of their product or service (the minimum viable product) to the market. 

This allows us to invest modest amounts and give the company an opportunity to refine its business model.  Once the business model is proven, the risk is reduced and it is generally easier for the company to then raise substantial capital to execute its business model.

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Learned is the past-president of the Boise Angel Alliance and the Director of Venture College at Boise State. This column was originally published in the Idaho Statesman's Business Insider on December 17, 2013. Learned writes monthly on angel investing and startups for the Business Insider.  Columns are subsequently published in this blog. You can reach him through kelearned@msn.com. 

Lean Startup: Business Planning for Startups Has Been Wrong

Entrepreneur, Stanford/Berkley/Columbia professor and startup expert Steve Blank in May, 2013 published an article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything.”  The article is available for free downloading at steveblank.com.  

Blank says “no business plan survives first contact with customers.”  By this he means we have startup business planning all wrong. Rather than assume the plan is correct, Blank urges us to realize the plan is based upon a series of assumptions, some of which are highly likely to be wrong.  This is because a startup, by its very nature, deals with uncertainty.  It’s trying to do something new and different.

That was certainly my case.  In one of Learned-Mahn’s (a computer software company I co-founded) blunders, we designed and programmed a very specialized accounting system for trusts and estates.  We wrote the system because my father, a retired accountant, was the trustee and executor for a large estate.  Once the program was complete, we learned no one else did trust and estate accounting the way my father did.

One accounting firm that tried the product, however, forced the system into something it wasn't meant to do—keep small company books. We then modified the program to allow accountants to use it to keep books for their small business clients.  Turned out that most accountants found that uninteresting as well.  Finally, almost in spite of ourselves, large companies found the system and began to use it.  By then several years and most of our capital was gone.  If only we had first gone to the market and then built the product rather than the other way around.

For the forty years or so we have been teaching entrepreneurship, the standard prescription for an entrepreneur intending to start a business has been to write a business plan.  Once written, the entrepreneur proceeds to execute the plan, building the product or service, and bringing it to the market.  Yet we know many, if not most business startups fail.  Rather than accepting this fact as immutable, Blank argues persuasively that what entrepreneurs have been doing frequently leads to failure because the startup business-planning model is wrong. 

Here’s the hallmark of Blank’s approach:  A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable and profitable business model--how the business will create and capture value.  The founder’s vision initially is a series of unproven assumptions about the market. The job of the founder is to turn the assumptions into facts as quickly and inexpensively as possible—hence the phrase “Lean Startup.”

I've seen in my business counseling and angel investing career dozens of examples of the entrepreneur raising capital and beginning to execute to a series of assumptions that turn out to be wrong.  Most heartbreaking is when an entrepreneur invests his or her life savings, and perhaps that of family and friends into inventory of a physical product only to learn the design is wrong, or the price needed to produce a profit too high. 

So Blank prescribes a rigorous, formal process of testing assumptions as quickly and cheaply as possible in the search for the business model.  It involves consciously writing down the assumptions about the business model and then designing inexpensive tests of those assumptions.  Getting these assumptions right before a lot of time and money is invested is important to both entrepreneurs and those who finance them. 

Fellow Venture College directors Ed Zimmer and Mary Andrews, and I were privileged to sit at Blank’s feet in New York recently as we learned his methodology.  We have embraced the methodology at Venture College and our entrepreneurs are successfully implementing it. In coming articles I will write about how entrepreneurs can utilize Lean Startup techniques to search for a scalable, repeatable and profitably business model.

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Kevin Learned is former software executive, entrepreneurship professor and business counselor.  He is a board member of the Boise Angel Alliance and co-founder of its two related angel funds.  He is the director of Venture College at Boise State University, a program to help current college and graduate students start businesses while continuing their studies.  He can be reached at kevinlearned@boisestate.edu or 208-426-3573.  

This blog post was originally published by the Business Insider, a business magazine of the Idaho Statesman.

Be Careful of Family and Friends as Board Members

My last post was on the importance of outside, knowledgeable board members and how some entrepreneurs unwisely try to control their boards.  I am expanding on that article with my experience with family and friends in management and on the board.

Gary Mahn and I cofounded Learned-Mahn in the early 1970’s.  When Gary and I joined together we were best friends. Bea Black had come to work for me right out of college. Later my wife Nancy Learned (now Briggs) joined us.

We were well educated, hard working, and totally dedicated to the success of the company.  But even with these attributes, I believe our personal relationships got in the way of our success.

When family and/or close friends run a company, management is often by consensus.  The problem with this is that options, which may be good for the organization but bad for an individual, are rarely discussed, much less implemented. Further, it is difficult for the leader to hold his or her friends and family members accountable. 

Our first board consisted of Gary (best friend), Bea (who I had mentored since she graduated from college), Nancy (my wife), my father (who had invested in the company) and me. For a while Bea’s father (who had also invested in the company) also served on the board. 

We thought at the time we were doing the right thing; but as I read this, it was ludicrous. I would never again invest in a company with this degree of family and friends in management and on the board. Boards need to inspire and to hold management accountable. But when management is the board, and half of it is family, there’s no real accountability. 

And if the company tries to change that structure, the results are predictable—everyone reverts to protecting their own interests rather than doing what is right for the company. Gary, Bea, Nancy and I all believed we should be on the board. After all, we were the founders and managers, we had capital invested and felt we should be on the board by virtue of our stock positions.

My father was a good businessman, but he knew little about the markets or the technology we were deploying.  We felt there were others who could bring more to the boardroom. When I tried to talk my father into resigning, he threatened a proxy fight.  This obviously impacted our relationship, but Dad and I were able to resolve our differences

Ultimately Gary, Bea and I left the company, Dad resigned from the board, and Nancy was made the president. The company made the transition from an inside board to an outside board. Ray Smelek, who was a senior vice president at Hewlett Packard, Chuck Jepson who left HP to run a technology company in California, and Gary Atkins who left HP to start Extended Systems joined the board. Their impact was huge. They demanded performance, constantly pushing Nancy and her team to move more quickly, to grow more rapidly.

I know the counsel of the board was often frustrating to management.  Its demands on management and the company were difficult.  But in hindsight, I believe the success the company ultimately achieved was due primarily to having a skilled president clearly in charge without any family or friends as employees, and to having an experienced, outside, demanding board. The company was sold to National Data Corporation of Atlanta in 1994 in a successful exit for the shareholders.  In 1999 National Data Corporation closed the Boise office.

Dr. Kevin Learned is the Director of the Venture College at Boise State and an experienced angel investor.  208-426-3875, kevinlearned@boisestate.edu

Don't Be Afraid of Outside Board Members

Its board of directors governs a corporation.  The owners or shareholders elect the board; the board delegates management of the company to management.  In my view the board has two principle tasks:  (1) to hire, evaluate, and when necessary dismiss the CEO and (2) to see that there is an effective strategy in place and being executed. 

In early stage companies, the founders generally form the board.  They are the shareholders, the board members and the officers. But when they begin to raise capital, the new shareholders will want to have something to say about who will serve on the board.  This frequently makes the founders nervous as they want to stay in control of their company’s and their own destiny.

Often we angels see boards made up of two founders and one outsider elected by the investors, or the CEO and his or her spouse, and one outsider.  I believe when the CEO does this, he or she is missing an opportunity to bring put in place a board that will not only bring expertise to the company, but will also hold management accountable and thereby accelerate the company’s progress.

When we had Learned-Mahn back in the 1980’s, we had an all inside board consisting of the four founding officers and my father.  It didn’t really work very well.  I was the CEO and the other officers worked for me.  But they were the directors, and I worked for them.  My father brought really interesting family dynamics into the boardroom where they didn’t belong.  And what good was a board meeting when all of the officers worked together all day long?  We didn’t get any outside perspective. 

After agonizing discussion, we decided to bring in outside board members to replace the three management directors that reported to me.  We didn’t replace my father, but family dynamics are the subject of another article at another time.  We were able to recruit experienced business people to the board who could bring their experience to our company.  They included Ray Smelek, who brought HP to Boise, John Dahl, who had just retired as the President of the Simplot Company, Gary Atkins, CEO and Founder of Extended Systems and Charles Jepson who was an early HP employee, and an experienced small company CEO.  

We got expert advice and counsel, and for the first time, I became accountable to people who weren’t my employees.  In hindsight, I think that was one of the best business decisions we ever made.  The outside board made us face our weaknesses and guided us to successful strategies. In fact, Smelek’s counsel convinced us to see ourselves as a financial software company rather than a company for banks.  But for him we might never had seen this blind spot because we were to close to the day-to-day operations.

Today I serve on the board of Medical Management, Inc. The company manages both physician-owned and hospital-owned medical clinics throughout the Pacific Northwest. Until a year ago the board members were all company employees who owned company stock.  A year ago the CEO, Jim Trounson took the difficult step of asking the internal board members to resign.  He replaced them with Dr. Ted Epperley, CEO of the Family Practice Residency program in Boise and Dr. Pat Hermanson, a retired hospital administrator and currently a professor of healthcare management at Idaho State, along with myself. 

We have served a year and were just re-elected by the shareholders, so apparently the shareholders are happy with the change.  The boardroom is a much different place that it was before we were elected.  We bring our diverse perspectives to the company and we hold company management accountable for performance.  The results after the first year have been terrific.

When small company management tries to hold onto control of the boardroom, I believe it is making a big mistake.  The team is giving up the information and counsel they could be receiving, and they are shying away from accountability.  Most entrepreneurs are so focused on execution, they lose sight of the big picture. An outside board will force you to confront your weaknesses and help you see opportunity where you may only see problems.

Dr. Kevin Learned is the Director of the Venture College at Boise State and an experienced angel investor.  208-426-3875, kevinlearned@boisestate.edu, http://kevinlearned.blogspot.com/

Market Feedback is Critical to Early-Stage Companies

The local Boise angels like to invest in “Seed-Stage” companies. A seed-stage company has a workable product or service in the market place and is beginning to generate some revenue. It needs to test the market and learn which customers will find the offering most attractive, how those customers can be reached and what product features are of most interest.

Often what happens is the entrepreneurs will learn that they need to make changes to the product and/or their original market is not the most interesting market.  Many years ago the company I co-founded, Learned-Mahn brought a computer-based accounting system to the market.  Our hypothesis was that most small businesses would find this attractive.  At the time most did their books by hand.

Our market tests helped us learn that our product cost too much for small businesses, and there was no efficient way to reach the target market.  But as we attempted to sell the system, we learned there was a niche with certain large companies that we could profitably reach and who needed what we had to offer. We went on to license the software to AT&T, Campbell Soup and the 1984 Olympics to name a few.

Good entrepreneurs know that almost never will the first version of a product be what the customer will pay for and that frequently the initial target market will not be most productive market.  The most important step for them to take is to bring something to the market as quickly and inexpensively as possible so that they can start to get feedback from real customers. 

We have learned that no matter how much you know about a market, you need to get out of the office and talk to that market.  And the best way to talk to a market is to ask it to actually purchase something. When you do, you get real information about real consumer behavior.

Steve Jobs knew this better than most.  His entire career he brought out less than fully featured products and got instant market-based feedback. Think of the changes that have been made to the iPhone since the first one was released, or the iPad.  Apple is superb at learning from the market place and then releasing a new version of a product that captures a much larger market.

An example of a local company who has brought an early service to the market and learned from its experience is Social Good Network.  Both the Statesman’s reporters and I have written about Social Good Network before.

The Boise Angel Alliance has invested in Social Good Network through its two angel funds. (Full disclosure, I am an investor in those funds.) The purpose of our funding was to enable the company to test its services in the market.

The company provides an on-line fund raising community for charities.  It offers several services:

•       Consumers can shop on line merchants through the community.  When they do, Social Good Network earns a commission. The consumer can then designate 50% of that commission to a charity of his or her choice.  
•        The consumer can make a direct donation to the charity through the on line community. 
•        Charities can install unique patent pending software directly on their web sites, which allows contributors to make donations without leaving the charities’ sites.

The November/December time frame was a perfect time to test these services, both shopping as well as contributions.  Their theory was that they were a consumer centric community focused primarily on shopping.  They learned that the charities were more excited about the donation services.

Armed with this information, the company now knows where to focus its valuable resources. It is changing its software road map and marketing to respond to the information it gained from taking the initial product to the market place.

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Kevin Learned is the Director of Venture College at Boise State University, and the co-founder of two angel funds which invest in early stage companies in the Boise, Idaho area.

Update on Crowd Funding

On April 5, 2012 the President signed into law the JOBS act, which stands for “Jumpstart Our Business Startups.” I wrote about this act earlier (see The JOBS Act will change fundraising for startups, April 18, 2012).  We are gradually learning more about how the act will be implemented.

 I recently participated in an on-line seminar produced jointly by SCORE (the Service Corps of Retired Executives) and the National CrowdFunding Association (http://nlcfa.org/).  SCORE provides free counseling services to small business people.  There is an excellent local chapter in Boise (http://www.idahotvscore.org/).  My fellow Business Insider columnist Norm Becker is a SCORE volunteer.

 Crowd funding is the act of soliciting funds from groups of people who share a common interest.  Crowd funding portals such as Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/) and Indiegogo (http://www.indiegogo.com/) provide platforms where entrepreneurs can solicit contributions and pre-sales to support their projects. The portals earn commissions on the funds raised.

 Today they cannot sell stock, but once the JOBS act is implemented they will be able to do so.  The JOBS act directed the US Securities and Exchange Commission to develop rules for selling stock using crowd funding.  Current expectations are those rules will be issued in the first half of 2013.

 Crowd funding is big and growing rapidly. The amount of money raised in recent years and projected to be raised according the Association is:

 Contributions and product pre-sales only

2009            $530 million

2010            $854 million

2011            $1.401 billion

2012            $2.806 billion

 Contributions, product pre-sales and stock sales:

2013            $6.058 billion

2014            $16.615 billion

 There will be an approval process for portals like Kickstarter and Indiogogo. Once the rules are released and the portals approved, I expect the process to work something like this:

 1.  The entrepreneur submits his or her business plan and stock offering to the portal. The offering must have a minimum amount to be raised and a deadline.

2. The portal approves or disapproves the offering.

3.  Once approved, the offer is posted and the crowd (the many individuals expected to watch the portals) sees the offer and makes individual decisions whether to invest or not.

4.  Individuals interested in investing submit funds to the portal.

5. The portal holds the funds in escrow until the minimum is raised. 

6. If the minimum is not raised by the deadline, the funds are returned to the investors.  If the minimum is raised, the portal transfers the funds, less its commission to the company.

7. The company transfers stock to those who purchased it.

8. Thereafter the company conducts its business and reports to its shareholders.

While the potential to help entrepreneurial businesses is great, it won’t be a panacea and there will be real costs in time and money. Businesses without outside shareholders are often run for the benefit of the manager/owners.  With outside shareholders, they will have to be run in a business-like manner without favoritism to the founders and managers. 

Raising capital through crowd funding will be a time-consuming process, both before and after selling stock. The business will have to be prepared to assume the record keeping and reporting obligations that come with having many shareholders. And the officers and directors will likely be at risk should the rules not be followed before, during and after the offering

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Dr. Kevin Learned is on special assignment with the Division of Research and Economic Development at Boise State. He was the co-founder of Learned-Mahn, Inc., which he believes was the first commercial software company in Idaho.  He is past president of the Boise Angel Alliance and an investor in its funds, the Boise Angel Fund and the Treasure Valley Angel Fund.   He can be reached at kevinlearned@boisestate.edu, 208-426-3573. This piece was first published in the Idaho Statesman's Business Insider.