The Kauffman Foundation has some data on angel investor investment and returns at their Angel Investor Performance Project. The data has some serious limitations, mainly that it is relatively concentrated in time (44% of the investments with data are ’99 or ’00), that there’s not enough investments to draw fine-grained conclusions, and that valuations at […]
Posts for March 2013
Transcending Hobbyism (Angel Investing 4)
A company I really liked was out raising money. They went to a very well known early stage VC and had a great first meeting. A couple of days later the partner got back to them with a no. He said “We really like you and your company, but we have a portfolio construction problem.” […]
How to be Different When What you Sell is a Commodity (Angel Investing 3)
When I started a company my co-founders and I thought and discussed and argued about how we were different from our competitors, how there was a hole in the market, how we were going to win by going where no one had gone before. We got potential customers, suppliers, employees excited by talking about how […]
The Work-Work Balance (Angel Investing, 2)
The first question every prospective angel (and all my relatives) ask me is “What do you do all day?” It’s sort of a funny question. For any job more varied than working on an assembly line, the answer is either going to be pretty long or pretty vague. Usually I go with vague. Today I’m […]
Why I’m Not an Angel
If you bootstrap your business it’s your prerogative to make any stupid decisions you want–so long as you don’t run out of money. But if you decide you want your bootstrapped business to be as successful as possible, you probably make pretty much the same decisions a businessperson backed by outside capital does. The process […]
On being an asshole
Here’s something you didn’t know about me: I’m vaguely claustrophobic. It doesn’t mean much in practice, but when I was at the last TechStars demo day at Webster Hall, I watched the presenters from the same place I watched the Beastie Boys in 1985, the Mountain Goats in 2008 and every concert in between–the back […]