angel investor

“One of my radar detectors for bad angel investor, if you will, is if they're asking me as a founder to any, what if this, What if that? There are a million what ifs it could go. My radar for a good angel investor is if they're asking me, ah, they're sitting do…”

“Angel investors and VCs can be very important, can be very valuable, but I don't think they do much of the work, and I really don't think they can save a ship from going off the wrong course.”

“Typically, the VC is going to require a 10 to 15% option pool for the employees, which makes sense, but usually the angel investor is getting squeezed by that as well.”

“If you're going to do 30 investments, you should probably have a investment rate of, let's say, five to 10%, which means you should see 300 to 600 companies if you're investing at five to five to 10% acceptance rate before you hit 30 companies.”

“If you're serious about becoming an angel investor, you're going to need to do probably 30 investments before you really know what you're doing.”

“So for me, I would rather prove out my expertise to an entrepreneur. I would rather contribute to the ecosystem. And hope that they see that value, and instead of cutting me out of a deal, they're more motivated to bring me in.”

“There was sort of this kind of, I think pessimism or even a little bit of distrust where this idea seems so obvious to people that because it didn't exist, there must be something wrong with this idea that they didn't know. And so, it actually, you would think…”

“To be a successful angel investor, you have to understand that clear thesis, and that clear thesis has to tell me what kind of deals you won't do, As well as what kind of deals you will do. And you have to be prepared to defend that thesis. And I think if you …”

“An angel, at least, has never solved, as far as I know, solved the business's problems or been responsible for a startup success. It's always about the operators figuring it out on their own with some guidance and some coaching and feedback”

“As an angel investor, it's a lot more risky because it's your own money, and if you make a bad bet, that's money you'll never see again, and you know, most of us aren't making management fees, and we're kind of getting by the returns that we make for ourselves…”

“They can get started just by writing 25 K checks into early stage companies, maybe budget a hundred K sort of quote unquote tuition, sort of learning the world of investing and going through the motion.”

“If an angel sources and closes one key candidate, or they give you one to do dedicated hours per month, they've delivered their value for say a 25 to 50 K check.”

“An angel is kind of the equivalent of investing as a friend. They're not nearly as invested. They're not, as it were, like married to the project. They put money in lots of different bets, even when they're, they can be very helpful and helpful, and they're no…”

“If you are a great angel investor as a founder, you can probably make more money just in angel investing. Why would you want to dilute your possibilities by taking on other money?”

“I, in the early days of writing checks, I wasted my time and money on reviewing the legal docs. Like I would hire lawyers and get them to review it. And then I pretty quickly learned that like, these are all pretty standard docs. And as a tiny check writer, I …”

“I think the other one I see also is when they choose founders that need their specific help. So they're a B to B sales leader and they're like, oh, I could really help in that B to B sales engine. Doesn't mean it's a good investment.”

“Lesson one, you don't have conviction at the early stage. Just do 25 K, 10 K, 50 K, I don't care, but same check size. Number two, you need 25. This idea that you're a genius picker, you're not. No one is. Five is not enough. You need 25.”

“I think one is just how important the founders that you work with and invest in become as a source of leads for you. And I didn't fully imagine that when I started being an angel investor, I was like, oh, where am I going to find, you know, great deals to work…”

“I mean, I understand why, but I don't understand why small time angel investors should be locked up for six months.”

“I think that it's great to have these names, but very, very few actually extract the value that they want or need from them.”

“I think too many people in our industry, particularly angels who have other jobs, full-time jobs, We'll take the view that probably someone else has done the work. I actually think often it's surprising how people haven't done the work.”

“It led me to draw the conclusion as an angel, I shouldn't follow on. So I had examples of companies that would go up sort of 50 X, my pro rata allocation in the next round would be a million dollars plus, and they went to zero.”

“The biggest annoyance for me is actually when people don't understand the weight of their check, and what I mean by that is like when a small 50 or a hundred k check wants 10 diligence meetings, and then wants 15 references, and you're like, dude, you're a fuc…”

“Don't have minimums because some people can be amazingly helpful with five K and so don't rule them out because of that.”

“Never have a minimum check size for amazing angels. There's some who can only do five K, or, I mean, some are one K, and you can do that with angel or syndicates. Like, it's just as valuable, and often they'll give more because it means more to them.”

“Then around 2015, a lot of the VCs started coming downstream. Or upstream, as it were, choose your metaphor. And they were hunting in the same ponds that the angels were. And before you know it, then you have like Tiger Global and all sorts of other folks who …”