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Peter Wilkins, a Hyde Park Angels board member who describes himself as “an entrepreneur at heart,” was named as the new managing director of Hyde Park Angels yesterday after over a month-long search by Marengo Hampshire Partners.
Wilkins has founded and led multiple companies across the tech, healthcare and education industries. Previously, he was the CEO and co-founder of education startup New Futuro, which helps Latino families get their students into college.
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He will leverage his entrepreneurial experience in his new role, which he will assume July 21, by connecting Hyde Park Angels’ nearly 30 portfolio companies and over 120 members. Hyde Park Angels, which was founded in 2006 by a group of University of Chicago students in the Booth School of Business executive MBA program, is one of the Midwest's largest angel organizations.
“Our members want to see entrepreneurs be successful,” Wilkins said. “When I look at Hyde Park Angels and its members, there’s a lot of expertise that we can match with entrepreneurs to improve the probability that everyone’s successful.”
In the name of success, Wilkins offered his own entrepreneurial advice to Chicago companies looking to scale and get to the next level:
1. Create value - and show it
"What intrigues me about any new business is 'How do they create value?' and 'What is the value chain?' Understand what benefits you create for a business or an individual. Then think how your solution creates value that is easily consumed? A lot of people aren’t going to change how they do things, so you have to think, 'Will they adopt that change of behavior?' I don’t care if its Facebook or a small SaaS platform, that value chain is very important."
2. Validate with more than just early adopters
"The hardest part for companies that are scaling is that they’ve been able to validate the market with the early adopters, whose characteristics are different from the mainstream consumer. They validate to get adoption, but are not validating the assumptions they have about the market. The lessons learned don’t necessarily translate. That’s one core element where the ability to analyze data will separate good companies from others."
3. Think hard about raising capital
"Entrepreneurs are looking for funding because they think it’s a necessary step for success and they don’t understand what that means to bring investment capital into their business. I support the arguments that you don’t need to take on capital to have a wildy successful business. This is critical to make the best decisions. Once you get capital, the expectations change because that’s part of the agreement."
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