By Janis Siegel, Jewish Sound Correspondent
In today’s high-risk, high-reward venture capital scene, longtime Seattle entrepreneur and angel investor Jon Staenberg of Staenberg Venture Partners has funded his share of startups and brokered hundreds of deals by using conventional wisdom — stick to the businesses you know and to the companies you like.
Since 1997, his company has funded what are today well-known entities that include Squaretrade, Docusign, and Facebook.
Staenberg is most comfortable in tech and social media startup communities. Staying within his ken gives him the confidence it takes to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into an early-stage startup in return for a piece of the action.
“I invest mostly in Seattle and San Francisco because it’s my backyard and I know the players and the entrepreneurs and the kinds of deals and the competition,” Staenberg told The Jewish Sound.
“I’ve made over 200 angel investments over 20 years and almost all of them are tech-related,” said Staenberg. “To get the kind of fast growth and return profile an angel investor normally seeks out, it almost always needs to be tech.”
In 2006, Staenberg turned his business focus toward another one of his passions and co-founded the Hand of God winery in the Maipu region of Argentina, dedicated to high-end, “ultra-premium” varietal wines.
Its first release of RivkaSimone Wine, dedicated to the birth of his daughter in 2008, sold out that year. Since then, Staenberg recently opened an appointment-only tasting room in downtown Seattle.
“There are exceptions, of course,” said Staenberg, who seemingly violated his own rule of making a quick profitable turnaround from investments by opening the winery. “I know, seeing firsthand in the wine business, it’s very hard to grow a physical goods company with inventory quickly. These days, you can go from zero to a million customers quite quickly with an iPhone application much more easily.”
The Jewish single father of a six-and-a-half-year-old daughter who lives in San Francisco was raised in Omaha, Neb., and originally moved to the Northwest in 1988 to take a job with Microsoft. Staenberg earned his undergraduate, graduate, and master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University. He speaks Chinese, and lived in Asia for three years because he “loves the language and the culture,” he said.
Today, he’s blended the loves of his life — his daughter, wine, fine food and his passion for the proverbial good life.
Earlier this month, Staenberg invited nearly 50 accredited angel investors to a lunchtime meeting at his private club, event space, and “pop-up restaurant” in Seattle called The VUDE, the Velvet Underground Dining Experience, when the founder and CEO of the Jerusalem-based startup and crowdfunding platform Jon Medved from OurCrowd called.
“We’ve talked about me potentially working with them as a channel partner who will help them source deals,” said Staenberg. “I’ve actually spent a fair amount of time looking at deals but these take a lot of time to bring to market.”
OurCrowd in the Americas vice president Audrey Jacobs told The Jewish Sound in October 2014 that the company had 6,000 registered accredited investors from 54 countries.
According to the Haaretz newspaper, OurCrowd has amassed $85 million in investments, with only 20 percent of its companies located outside of Israel.
In Seattle, they ate, they talked startups, and Staenberg calculated.
“I am interested in OurCrowd deals, but I don’t know the players and I don’t have the time to get there and get up to speed,” he said. “I expect I will invest in Israel, through them. I think their message is a good one, a strong one, a coherent one, and a compelling one.”
Back in the Northwest, Staenberg said he is intrigued by the increasingly innovative biomedical and biotech research hub that is developing here, speculating he may have to risk some capital in that burgeoning sector.
“I certainly am very bullish on what’s going to happen in that realm in the next decade, and I do want some investment exposure, but it usually requires a level of study, knowledge, and expertise that I don’t have,” he said. “I wish I was smarter about it.”
Staenberg is convinced that opportunities are out there for even the greenest of entrepreneurs and sees a bright future in startups.
Although angel investing was once reserved for the well-connected living in Silicon Valley, he said, technology, communications, and social media has changed all of that.
“I think for years it was a bit of an insider’s club,” said Staenberg, “but now there’s more money coming in. The numbers last quarter were quite large, and part of it is because you’ve got this angel investment category that’s increased. I think overall it’s a good thing.”