Sublime

Perhaps the best way to develop your reputation as a value-adding investor for startups is to add value to startups. Brian Cohen is now a well-known angel investor (he was the first angel to discover Pinterest), but his initial steps into the field were as a pro-bono advisor. When he first joined New York Angels, he offered to help any of the group

The benefits of joining a group include pooling deal flow, capital, domain expertise, and investing experience. Most groups run regular education sessions for new members and provide mentoring for less experienced investors from those with many deals under their belts.

Once an investment is made, the rough outcomes (averaged from several independent studies of angel returns) are: 50 percent eventually fail completely. 20 percent eventually return the original investment. 20 percent return a profit of 2 to 3 times the investment. 9 percent return a profit of 10 times the investment. 1 percent return a profit of mo

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.

In Chapter 5, I discussed the critical first part of angel investing: seeking exciting potential companies in which to invest, and building your top-of-the-funnel deal flow. We went through a host of places you could visit proactively to find investment targets, from personal connections and meetups to angel groups and Demo Days. But while the worl