Competition Mission

The Angel Capital Association (ACA)’s Silvertip Awards recognize North America’s most promising angel-backed companies. Through an innovative design the competition brings angel & strategic investors, entrepreneurs, and MBA participants together in a collaborative environment. The collaboration facilitates exciting new connections to form between participants while simultaneously revealing which companies are most deserving of recognition.

The Opportunity

To harness the collective domain expertise of highly skilled participants and domain experts to provide more bandwidth to fairly evaluate contestants. This offers participants a win-win opportunity through a) hands’-on experience evaluating real startups and b) the opportunity to meaningfully interact with angel investors, strategic investors, and exciting startup CEOs.

We do this by providing:

A collaborative online platform employing crowdsourcing technologies that aggregate your analysis while putting you in direct contact with contestants, angel investors, and strategic investors.
An in-person networking event for all participants, providing an opportunity to deepen relationships started via the online platform.
Additional high-level access opportunities for a handful of participants who prove their abilities.

Why Participate

You get to match your expertise against the world’s top angel investors and corporate acquirers. Do you think you have the insight to pick the winning entry? Here is your chance to showcase what you know. While doing so, you get to interact directly with startups, select angel investors, and corporate acquirers.

All participants receive an invitation to an in-person networking event (4/4) where they can meet key players in the competition. A handful of participants will also win VIP Badges, granting high-level access to competition finalists, sponsors, a free ticket to participate in the 2011 ACA Summit (4/4-6), public recognition at the summit, and a ticket into the VIP awards reception.

Round I Judging Experience

Overview

ACA has created a collaborative platform built around an innovative crowdsourcing technology (powered by InklingMarkets). This platform allows participants to interact with one another, competition contestants, angel investors, and strategic investors such as HP and PwC. The platform’s crowdsourcing technology allows contestants’ scores to change in real time as new information and analysis is revealed.

Your task is to begin your own due diligence exploration of a handful of the most interesting (to you) contestants. You will be posed with three core questions for each company and asked to generate your best initial predictions. No sooner will you post your initial answers then you will see your peers debate the relative merits of their own answers and research. participants won’t be alone. The company’s management team and angel investors will be invited to participate.

You’ll have two weeks to participate in this dialog and fine-tune your answers to the core questions. At the end of those two weeks, the answers of all participants will be used to determine which companies proceed on to the next round. In other words: you are the first round judges for this competition.

In the weeks that follow, you will be provided a chance to make YOUR predictions for who the winners should be and see how you do vs. the actual judges. You will also be given access to the networking events mentioned above.

So What Exactly Will We Be Doing?

Week of 2/28: Sign Up
3/7-3/20: Round I

3/6 Orientation These short videos (each < 5 min) provide a simple demonstration of how to use the Inkling Platform:

3/7 Packet

Receive a PDF containing data on the contestants.
Receive your login credentials for the platform.
Review the list and select at least 5 to actively follow.
Conduct some initial basic research.

3/8 Post - Via the platform, post your initial guesses to the 3 core questions (likely exit valuation, likely time-to-exit, amount of $$ needed to get to exit). Also post any questions you may have for the company’s management team / investors.
3/9-3/20 Debate - Use the platform to engage in respectful debate with your peers, management, and investors. As you learn more, update your answers to the core questions.

3/30 Finalists Selected - Finalists are selected based on the aggregated opinions of everyone who has used the platform.
3/21-28: Round II

Switch from evaluating the original questions (market viability of contestants) to making predictions on which companies will win each of the competition’s awards.
A panel of judges composed of angel and strategic investors select the winner for each of the competition’s awards.
A handful of participant participants are awarded VIP Badges (details below).
At week’s end the competition winners and VIP Badge recipients are notified.

Week of 3/28: Postmortem - participants are asked to participate in a webinar and online survey to share their thoughts on how the participant experience and competition could be improved.
Week of 4/4: Awards Ceremony and Related Events

4/4: participant Recognition Event.
4/4-6: Angel Capital Association Summit (invite-only, free tickets provided to VIP Badge holders).
4/5: Awards Ceremony.
4/5: Silvertip Awards Dinner (invite-only, free tickets provided to VIP Badge holders).

VIP Badges

Five participants will be awarded VIP Badges, granting high-level access to competition finalists, sponsors, a free ticket to participate in the 2011 ACA Summit (4/4-6), public recognition at the summit, and a ticket into the VIP awards reception.

VIP badges will be awarded by lottery. The number of "lottery tickets" you posses is equal to your score (Net Worth) in Inkling. So the better you do at making predictions and convincing others that you are right, the higher your score will be, and the higher your odds of winning. And to spice things up further, we will periodically post challenges. Those who complete the challenges will be awarded extra $$, increasing their score and therefore increasing their odds of winning a VIP badge. Challenges will be posted via the competition blog and Twitter @SilvertipAwards.

Time Commitment & Expectations

Our objective is for this to be 5-10 hours per week for Round I and about half that much for Round 2. This is an extra-curricular activity. We place no formal requirements on much or little you should participate. If you are interested in a VIP Badge, then you must meet the requirements listed above, but otherwise the time investment is up to you.

Honor Code:

Consider all information you learn about contestants confidential.
If you have a conflict of interest with a contestant, recuse yourself from the competition.

You Are On The Bleeding Edge

This competition is the first of its kind and in its first year. This means we are likely to get heightened interest from leaders of the investing community, the startup press, and others. If you participate, you get the benefits that come from being in the “first class of” Silvertip Awards Judges.

Of course, that also means you are getting “version 1,” so you’ll get the “buggiest” version of this experience. Along the way you will undoubtedly provide a tremendous amount of feedback on how to ensure the program is even more valuable to participants next year.

If the opportunity outweighs the challenges of working with a new and untested program, then we’d love to have you participate.

Next Steps

1. Sign-up

2. View Demo of Inkling’s Platform

These short videos (each < 5 min) provide a simple demonstration of how to use the Inkling Platform:

Questions?

Post questions as comments on our Q&A forum.