Flynn's Harp: Marchi touts Big Sky as angel gathering place (7-7-10)

Liz Marchi, who guides the Montana Angel Network, hopes to create an awareness on the part of promising entrepreneurs seeking capital that angels are gathering in increasing numbers and quality under the Big Sky.

Marchi, whose primary role is overseeing the Frontier Angel Fund in Kalispell, is helping to launch the third angel-investor group since assuming oversight of the angel network in the state that she adopted sight unseen a decade ago.  She is convinced that nurturing angel-investor support for innovative companies will lure entrepreneurs to create companies in Montana and thus grow the state’s economy.

The July 17 kick-off meeting of the Missoula-based Big Sky Angels group will involve presentations by two companies seeking funds. One is a Ventura, CA, company called Stewart Brown that was incorporated in Montana nine years ago and is now looking to return, which she views as an example of angel support that can lure companies to, or back to, the state.

Montana’s entrepreneur image was dramatically enhanced in May when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a report that ranked the state first in the nation for entrepreneurship and innovation. That’s a ranking that can be misleading, since not all those described as entrepreneurs create businesses that create jobs.

But there’s nothing misleading about the fact the state is home to one of the nation’s most successful entrepreneurs and summer home to the man who may be the nation’s best-known angel investor.

Rob Ryan, who made his fortune taking several companies public, operates Entrepreneur America on his Roaring Ryan Ranch just south of Hamilton. He mentors, one at a time, a handful of the most-promising entrepreneurial companies that seek his help. And Bill Payne, who is one of the investors in Marchi’s fund and summers in Montana, has been described as the closest thing to a national entrepreneur laureate.

Marchi, who had already built a reputation as a successful business-development executive by creating and leading the Kalispell-based Montana West Economic Development organization after arriving here in 2000, decided in 2006 to launch the Frontier Angel Fund.

She admits she didn’t know what the outcome would be when she put together a pooled fund with $50,000 units, but by the end of that year she had almost three dozen members with residents of five states in addition to Montana involved. She raised $1.8 million, about $300,000 more than the working capital she had hoped for.

The Missoula angels’ launch meeting in a few days will also host a visit with Bill Payne, freshly returned from a stint in New Zealand, where he was invited to be entrepreneur in residence at the University of Auckland.

Dr. David Opitz, a homegrown entrepreneur who founded and grew Missoula-based Visual Learning Systems before selling it to Textron, has been tapped to lead the Missoula angel group.

Marchi describes Opitz as “a terrific entrepreneur who understands how to navigate the academic world as well as how to build a successful business. He will be a great collaborator for the new tech transfer efforts in process at the University of Montana.”

Marchi emphasizes that the Missoula group “will need to build its own culture.” But she adds “I think of its future as including angels who may not even live here but are maybe alumni of the University of Montana and very much want their money to be involved in new business endeavors in Missoula.”

That would not be unlike the makeup of her Frontier Angels group, which she says includes “five doctors, a veterinarian, three attorneys and at least four people who were once either CEOs or CFOs of Fortune 500 companies.” Members of the fund hail from California, Georgia, Vermont and Nevada, in addition to Montana.

Montana’s third angel group is the Bozeman-based Bridger Private Capital Network, a group of accredited angel investors formed about the same time as Marchi’s Frontier angel group.  But, unlike Frontier, it doesn’t function as a fund in which members pool their capital. Rather it describes itself as “Montana’s largest angel investor network.”

Marchi has roots in the intermountain area, having grown up on a ranch near Jackson Hole, in Wyoming.  But she traveled far, both in distance and “time,” when she left her job as executive director of communications and public policy for the Winston-Salem, N.C., chamber of commerce and moved with her then-husband and three children to Montana, a place she’d never been before.

“It was like going back in time,” says Marchi. “It was 2000, but it looked like the 1950s. The infrastructure was here but the state was languishing. There wasn’t a bank president who was using e-mail at the time.

“But technology has completely transformed this place,” she enthuses. “And the shared values are incredible. You’d never know if someone had a million dollars in their pickup.

“The quality of people who are doing things here proves that there’s no penalty for being in paradise.”