The Angel Association of New Zealand (AANZ) held its fifteenth Angel Summit at NZ High Country in Queenstown last week. Only approved vehicles are allowed to bring you to the venue so we all piled into buses in the rain to make our way up the rather challenging road.

There were approximately 160 attendees over the two days so it was great to soak up the atmosphere and meet many like minded people in the ecosystem. We had a crew of five from CA – myself, Joelle Grace, David Oliver, Richard Morgan and Richard Williams which was great. In the room there were VC’s, angels, advisors and lawyers to name a few.

The theme of 2022’s conference was ‘Go Big or Go Home – the HOW!’

They had a great lineup of speakers and panels scattered throughout the two days, some standout quotes and notes were:

• Don’t start a business, find a problem, solve a problem, the business comes second
  
  
• Listen to your customers not your competitors
  
  
• Angels need to stop the negative talk, pass on a deal rather than badmouth the founder. Feedback is always welcome but done in a constructive way
  
  
• The Start up Advisors are scaling the ecosystem to better support ambition. Currently 1500 startups in NZ, aspire to scale to 5000 by 2030
  
  
• Ron Weissman (vice chair at Angel Capital Association in the USA and also San Francisco Band of Angels) had a very informative session on global context and venture investment in a recession. He showed us many stats on the US and NZ. I will try and get a copy of his slides to share. Two primary takeaways were
• Angel portfolios typically get 90% of their returns from 10% of their investments
• Median valuation on SaaS entities now at 5.5x ARR (down from 8% last year) - valuations have dropped across the board
  
  
• NZ Angels have great resilience
  
  
• Pūrākau, or storytelling is an ancient form of not just transmitting ideas but of creating shared meaning and thus identity

• Great quote from Rhonda Kite of Kiwa Digital around the necessity to have successful business to drive social change - “The economic horse pulls the social cart”

• AANZ have revised the standard Term Sheet and will be releasing that new version to all Angel groups shortly

• Brianne West, founder of Ethique was the closing keynote and she and Rob Everett (NZGCP) had a chat around her journey from being a small start up to now being in 7000 stores and over 25 countries. Key takeaways
• Let’s be flexible in the way we think, try and do things differently not the same as everyone
• Your capacity to cope with what is hard grows as you grow your business
• Scaling to fulfil demand is harder than generating the demand
  
  

The Summit overall was a great opportunity to listen, mix and mingle with some great players in the industry and I highly recommend going along to anyone who is either new to the angel scene or simply wants to get more involved. 

If you want to know anymore, feel free to chat to any of the CA attendees, we’d welcome any feedback or questions.

- Gabby Addington