Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups

To recap: most startup businesses aren't worthy of investment, and no one, regardless of experience or expertise, is capable of routinely identifying which startups are worthy of investment and which are not. Despite these facts, angel investing—when done correctly—really can produce a consistent IRR in the 25 to 30 percent range. The way to achiev

Most professional angels (that is, people who would self-identify with the term angel investor and are ultimately planning to do ten or more investments) invest in business arenas they already know well. That is why most serious angel groups tend to cluster around particular industries. For example, in New York we have, among others, New York Angel

This means we need that last company to return 3x the value of our entire initial investment into all 10 companies. But since that company itself only received one tenth of our original investment, simple math tells us that in order to hit our target 25 percent IRR, that one, single company needs to return 30x ROI! And because we won't know in adva

As angels, we want to see all of a company's past financial information to date and projections of three to four years going forward after funding. Five years would be completely mythical,