Nivi · August 3rd, 2010
Last week, Naval and a slew of angels shared their investing advice with an audience of angels-in-training at AngelConf 2010.
Wade Roush at Xconomy took detailed notes on all the talks and published them here and here.
7 angel investing tips
Here are Wade’s detailed notes from Naval’s talk:
“1. Don’t move in a herd, but do be a pack animal. Not everybody has all the information. One angle might know the market, one might know the founder, one might know the customer base. Every time an angel comes into a round, they bring a piece of information. Ride on their coattails.
2. Say no early and often. You should be doing one deal for every 20 to 30 that you see. If you do more than that, you’re overinvesting.
3. You need to have a brand. The really great deals are obvious, and everybody wants in, and if you want to get in you need a brand. That could be that you have been successful with great companies in the past. And building a brand does not mean taking coffee meetings. Shallow connections do not mean much. If you have a fancy office on Sand Hill Road or Market Street, the best deals are not going to come to you. If you’re not out there running around getting to know people, then you are really just practicing the VC model.
4. Humility. When you’re sitting there all day and people are asking for money and more often than not you are saying no, it eventually goes to your head. The problem is that when a Mark Zuckerberg walks in, those guys have more offers than they have room for. If you come across as arrogant, they will drop you.
5. Your job is to be a little dispassionate. Don’t try to run the company. Don’t even take the power—if you don’t have it, you won’t be tempted to use it.
6. Filters. Every winner is unique by definition, because what they’re doing is new. But the losers tend to cluster around common mistakes, such as investing in a company with one founder. You will find you can establish filters, even one as simple as “Do what you love.”
7. There are many paths to success. You have to be very careful about taking your limited experience and trying to shoehorn your companies into it.”
Topics Angels · Conferences
A man who spends 7 minutes brushing his teeth has way more patience than I do … or really bad teeth.
Business Sales
This is good blog. In good way, if is defined. One Week investment in 7 minute.
May I suggest another route altogether? There are other options out there; apart from Angels and/or VCFs – namely so-called aggregators that are able to structure deals with conditions that are sometimes astounding. Here is one of them: the eSolveNano division of Esolve Capital (you can find them here: http://esolvenano.com)
Great tips, thanks for sharing, we invest in consumer products and try to keep things as simple as possible.
Well 7 minutes products are what people love, right? 7 minutes to do this 7 methods to do that 7 ideas to …. etc
the guy is a lunatic but knows how our society functions .. the magic pill still sells definitely .
I love venture hacks … My favorite read lately