Utah Angel Investor of the Year

On Tuesday, June 23rd at the Hilton Hotel in Salt Lake City, FundingUniverse will be announcing the first ever Utah Angel Investor of the Year award winner.

The top 15 finalists for this award are Alan Hall, Craig Earnshaw, David Carter, Gary Williams, Hal Widlansky, JD Gardner, John Richards, Kent Thomas, Kyle Love, Mark Madsen, Martin Frey, Nobu Mutaguchi, Robert Kunz, Scott Frazier and Warren Osborn.

Having been a big fan of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards for many years, I think it is exciting that FundingUniverse is going upstream a little bit to recognize some of the many angel investors who help those entrepreneurs get businesses off the ground.

I personally appreciate several of these 15 angels because some of them were our early investors at Ancestry.com (back in 1998) and more recently in FamilyLink.com (2007-2009 funding rounds.)

I hope this becomes an annual event, and I hope it spreads nationwide too, because angel investors are the unsung heroes of our free market economy. VCs get a lot of attention because they back high-profile companies. But from what I’ve read, angels generally fund 30-50 times more startup companies per year than VCs, and they fund a ton of small businesses that never become high profile but do create jobs and add value to our economy.

Kudos to Brock Blake and his FundingUniverse team for launching this idea.

Hint to entrepreneurs: if you want some inexpensive networking time with Utah’s very best angel investors, I suggest you buy a ticket (it’s only $25 per seat) and show up Tuesday (with plenty of business cards for all!) 🙂