Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000

At the core of being a great founder is the unrelenting desire to see your vision—or version—of the world realized. When you meet with founders as often as an angel should, you’re going to very quickly be able to sense if their startup matters enough to them. What you need to figure out is if this founder will quit when things get hard.

It’s important for you to understand that as an angel investor in a startup you are not their communications director. It will almost certainly become public that you are an investor in a startup, unless you take specific steps to hide your activity.

Founders also love angel syndicates because they exist as only one entity on their cap table: the SPV. This means they don’t have to collect dozens of investor signatures when doing future deals. Instead, they just need to get one signature from the syndicate lead who legally represents all of the other investors in the group.

Remember, on average we get paid out seven years after we invest in a company—if we get paid at all. If an angel has a twenty-year career investing and they start at forty years old, then they’ll start seeing returns when they are almost fifty—with just twenty good years left to spend that money.

Everyone wants to be a founder, but they don’t understand exactly what that means. Being the leader sucks because you’re ultimately responsible not only for your performance but also for the performance of your entire team, the market, your investors, your competitors, and even your customers. Most people calling themselves founders today are just

You have thirty bullets to fire and this is not a charity; this is a war. You should meet with the best teams capable of building products with sweat equity (see chapter 7) and who have the most traction. Perhaps after you make a huge return, you can run an incubator for people with business plans, or a coding school for people who don’t know how t

When evaluating deals in Silicon Valley, there is no reason for you, a new angel investor, to invest in pre-traction startups. You can, but you will be taking unnecessary risk. Furthermore because of your limited time, I recommend that you not meet with anyone who doesn’t have a product in the market. In my mind, founders shouldn’t be contacting an

What if you could do this all from your laptop and for as little as $1,000 per investment. Might that interest you? This was impossible to do ten years ago, but over the past five years, a handful of platforms have emerged that allow angels to syndicate deals via a legal construct called a special purpose vehicle (SPV).

How to allocate your finite time and energy efficiently is something you constantly have to revisit as an investor, founder, parent, and human being. The cost of not revisiting your allocation of time is great, leading to massive regret at having spent too much time on a startup, marriage, friendship, or investment that is destined to disappoint yo