Angel Investors ABCs: Patrons of Innovation
Venture Hacks does a great walkthrough of “How to Be an Angel” – from Naval Ravikant, who breaks down the three must-haves: access to capital, proprietary dealflow and good judgment to how to evaluate pitches and start-up teams.
Open Angel Forum and AngelList
Two relatively new resources for startup entrepreneurs looking for angel investments. AngelList springs from the VentureHacks group, while Open Angel Forum was founded by Jason Calacanis, after he challenged all of the angel forums and keiretsus who charged fees to startups seeking angels.
Via WSJ: Earlier this year, Internet entrepreneur and blogger Jason Calacanis started Open Angel Forum, which holds free pitch events in various cities where entrepreneurs selected from a pool of applicants can pitch to about 20 to 30 angel investors. [...] Another free service, AngelList, started in February by angels Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, vets dozens of deals before highlighting the best ones in emails each week sent to a group of 200 investors.
These are open source solutions, like Y Combinator, for startups and angels:
- Open Angel Forum: http://openangelforum.com/
- AngelList: http://venturehacks.com/angellist
- Y Combinator: http://ycombinator.com/
Angel Investors: No Bootstraps, No Problem (Maybe)
In the spirit of covering topics that my readers are interested in, today’s blog topic comes from a good friend and former colleague of mine (Ed) who wrote to me recently asking if I could write a “how-to” article of sorts about how to navigate the angel investor waters. In these challenging economic times, coupled with the complex landscape found in the venture and private equity worlds, angel investors occupy a very worthwhile niche within the start-up ecosystem. They offer a combination of funding (at lower amounts) and hands-on assistance that the majority of bigger money shops can’t or don’t offer – although as we’ve read recently a handful of them are starting to set up “seed bet” funds. Read more >>