WANTED: Angel and Venture Capitalists for Caribbean Tech Companies

FLASHBACK POST:

They can’t wait on the banks, because they are not interested or simply do not understand. Some can do it with Credit Union Loans. Others sell their friends and family on the “ investability” of their ideas. Yet many, many more sit languishing with great ideas and no cash to grease their idea factories forward. I know I’m already preaching to the converted, when I say we need both an Angel and a Venture Capital Fund here in the Caribbean, the start of a VC culture here in the Caribbean that will invest in bankable technology companies.( And when I say bankable, I mean in other things outside of companies set up to resell cellphones of the existing mobile providers. God knows we have enough of them.)

I know of too many companies that could use a love injection of cash to get their ideas going further, faster. I’ve spoken to the entrepreneurs who’ve been in the industry 3, 5,7 years and have achieved certain level of success, but none that can rival those of their colleagues in USA and Europe. And that’s a pity, as we are dripping with worldclass talent and ideas here.

Maybe this is something that Digicel, Cable & Wireless, The Spanish Companies, resident billionaires, The Irish Expats can look at. Become Angel investors, set up a Venture Capital Fund that’s geared towards helping these many brilliant small, fledgling, talent packed technology companies become inpactful and profitable. It’s hard for many of these entrepreneurs to watch good money, strong money chase crappy ideas in the USA when simply half or a quarter of that funding could take Jamaica and the Caribbean’s software industry global, take the wicked web apps, mobile games, mobile services out of the underfunded companies and to the world.

Will the first batch of ANgel Investors and Venture Capitalists step forward!