Peter Mellen (C’89, MBA’98)
Co-Founder and Board Member, Georgetown Angel Investor Network and President, Georgetown Entrepreneurship Alliance
What value does gain deliver for you as an alumnus and as an investor?
GAIN delivers a tremendous amount of value as an alumnus. It's an opportunity to connect with other Hoyas who I have a lot in common with. We share the Georgetown experience, the Georgetown values, and are passionate about startups and Angel investing. To be able to find those relationships and nourish them is invaluable.
From an investor perspective, it’s also an opportunity for me to help entrepreneurs that I'm partnered with get access to capital and a great opportunity to get access to deals that I probably wouldn't otherwise see. GAIN also gives me access to a group of peers who can give me additional input when I'm looking at deals. In assessing an investment decision there can be a lot of ambiguity and being able to lean on other members’ perspectives and expertise is so helpful. Fundamentally, we are stronger together than we are individually.
As one of the founders of GAIN can you tell me how the organization came about?
The concept came out of a conversation with Jeff Reid, Founding Director, Georgetown University Entrepreneurship Initiative. Creating an Angel network was something that had been on his radar for a long time but just wasn't making the kind of progress that he wanted to see.
From there, the earliest concept actually came out of a dinner following one of GEA’s Entrepreneurial Excellence Awards Event with Alums Jeff Chapski, David Fogel and Rich Bennett. At the time Rich Bennett was raising money for his start up Epicured and he said, “You know so much of my company has been centered around Georgetown and if there is one thing that you guys could do to be helpful, it would be to provide me access to capital.”
Rich agreed to work with us on a pilot, which was a non-trivial job. He became the first ever entrepreneur to go through the GAIN funding process, before there was a formalized network and process. After piloting the idea with Rich, we then brought a larger group together to begin to research the details involved in creating a formal network.
Where do you see GAIN going in the future?
To me, what's most exciting about GAIN is the opportunity to create a full cycle of value between alumni and the university. Right now, GAIN provides a lot of value to alumni and entrepreneurs by providing access to deal flow and capital, but in the future we hope to incorporate a way for alumni to give back in other ways.
As entrepreneurs and investors are successful, and the companies that we invest in start to reach points where they exit successfully, we hope our community will leverage those opportunities to give back to their alma mater and the entrepreneurship ecosystem.
The opportunity to create that virtuous cycle is the most exciting part of GAIN’s future.
What is most important to you when evaluating a company?
Traction is huge. It’s one thing to have an idea, but it's another to be able to execute. Traction is a valuable indicator of a company's potential to execute.
What is your best memory from your time at Georgetown?
I was hanging out in the basement of my townhouse at the corner of 36th and O across from Lauinger Library with a few buddies from Business School dreaming up business ideas for two days straight. We set up a stand with a bunch of paper where we were writing down all these crazy ideas; we must have ended up with like 10 pages just filled with different ideas for businesses that we could create.
After I graduated from Georgetown, one of those buddies ended up being my business partner and we founded my first venture backed startup.
Final thoughts?
If I had known that this was where my Georgetown undergraduate and graduate degrees were going to take me, I would have been ecstatic. I just can't imagine a better opportunity and a better way to be involved in Georgetown than to be immersed in this community of entrepreneurs and angel investors who are all committed to innovation, experimentation, and building startups.
It's really my ideal vision of how my Georgetown journey could have evolved.