By Yvonne Ratledge (Class of 2024)
Tony Shipley (’69) was awarded the Hans Severiens Award from the Angel Capital Association, the largest professional development organization in the world for angel investors. The award honors Shipley’s profound impact on the advancement of angel investing, which enables entrepreneurs to make their businesses a reality.
“It is an honor to be included in the group of people in our industry who have contributed so much to advance the art and science of angel investing,” says Shipley. “I take a great deal of pride in the fact that our team has done such great work, supporting entrepreneurship in our community and on a national basis.”
Shipley is a co-founder of Queen City Angels in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has served as a board member for more than 20 years. The organization has mentored and invested in many entrepreneurs in the Cincinnati area, helping improve the health of the local economy, and assisted many regionally and nationally based early-stage companies.
Shipley went to work with a Fortune 500 company right after graduating from UT in industrial engineering. His connection with a former professor working for the same company helped him get the job.
“It just goes to show that it is important to not only be educated in the area you want to work in but to also network with folks who can potentially help you along the path one takes with their career,” says Shipley.
Soon after he started his first job, Shipley received an unexpected opportunity to join a new kind of venture.
“Someone I met at my company had joined a startup based in Cincinnati,” says Shipley. “About six months later he called and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a job opening. Are you willing to come up for the interview?’ I said yes, and as they say, the rest is history.”
Shipley enjoyed four years with the startup before beginning his own entrepreneurial journey, which lasted about 25 years. In his time as an entrepreneur, he discovered the difficulties startups face in raising money to help fund their companies. That realization sparked an interest in angel investing.
“When we sold the last company in early 2020, I decided that rather than continuing to be an operator, it was time to look around the community to see what we could do to give back,” says Shipley. “We had a burning need in our community for early-stage investors to invest in technology startups. I decided that would be a cool way of using what I have learned over a couple of decades and apply it to help build an ecosystem here locally.”
Recently Shipley turned his attention to UT’s Spark Innovation Center, which focuses on developing regionally based technology startups. As a loyal Vol, Shipley took the opportunity to involve Queen City Angels in the Spark Innovation Center, expanding his organization’s portfolio by investing in Spark’s clean and sustainable technologies.
“It’s a hot area from the investment standpoint, and UT is one of the few universities that have this type of innovation center that’s set up for clean tech businesses,” says Shipley. “It was an opportunity for us to work with a fun, interesting group of people and interesting technology, but it’s also a way for us to think about how we can branch out in terms of the types of investments that we make through our organization.”
The angel investing driven by Shipley and Queen City Angels at UT is going to further support the research and innovation being conducted in Knoxville.
“By setting up this type of an innovation hub, you can unlock a lot of intellectual property and get it to a point where it can be assessed to determine if it can be a commercial success,” says Shipley. “It’s a fantastic winning opportunity for the University of Tennessee as well as the Knoxville community.”
