TrueFit CEO Darrin Grove to Participate in Panel at 2011 Global Entrepreneurship Week

TrueFit CEO, Darrin Grove, will be attending a new event at the 2011 Global Entrepreneurship Week called Think Like an Angel (TLA), which will be launched by the Tepper EVC Club and Project Olympus. This event is scheduled for Wednesday, November 16 from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. and will be held in Newell Simon Hall on CMU’s campus.

TLA is an event modeled after the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC), an international venture capital competition, which is held every year by the University of North Carolina. This particular event is being modified for angel level investing, rather than venture capital investing, and condensed so that it can be completed in one evening.

The basic premise of the competition is that the tables are turned, allowing students to play the role of the angels by evaluating real entrepreneurial businesses. After the companies make their investment pitches, teams of student “angels” will decide which companies in which they would and would not invest and why. For those companies in which they would invest, students identify questions they would have asked if they had time to perform due diligence, and prepare and present a simple valuation and term sheet.

Then the tables are turned again, and it is the student angel teams who must start pitching to a panel of angel investors who are observing from the periphery. They must convince their “partners,” the judges, that their investment decisions are sound, and more importantly, that they will provide a reasonable return for the risk taken. Finally, judges must choose a winner — the team they would most like to have as their angel partner, based on their evaluation of the teams' assessment of risk, knowledge of the investment process, communication skills and teamwork.