Sublime

back a really strong team so I can live more of my life. I’ve struggled to find really crackerjack distributors—they are critical to going from a $1-million-dollar company to my vision, which is $10 million within the next two years. So my challenge is identifying the winners—the right people to get on board. And if you need widgets, you can find u

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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

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Almost immediately, I raised $1.1M from an all-star cast of angel investors and venture capital firms, including Max Levchin, Chris Sacca, Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, Collaborative Fund, Accel Partners, and First Round Capital. A few months later, in May 2012, we raised $7M more. Mike Abbott from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a top-t... See more

it is in your own best interest to be respectful of, and helpful to, every entrepreneur with whom you meet. This is true even (especially) for those in whose companies you decide not to invest. Many of the most prominent angel investors with high public profiles—something that helps them get directly approached with hot deals—got that way because o

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In the 1980s, a venture capitalist could truthfully say their investment was the difference between life or death for an important, generational technology company. Funding such companies, in this way, was absolutely a good quest. But today there are more people "helping the builders" than actually building, fighting one another in a zero-sum game

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Peter Thiel doesn’t need much of an intro. He has been at both sides of the fundraising table, sometimes concurrently. He first invested in a precursor to what would become PayPal and soon after joined it in the early days as a co-founder and CEO. Later he founded and invested in Palantir, which specializes in big-data analytics. In August 2004, Th

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