I am in a financially secure position. I have no debt, I am single, no mortgage to pay, and no need to work (although I do it anyway because I enjoy it). I am not "super" wealthy either. Rather than having money sitting in the bank, I've decided to invest $250,000. $200,000 will go into vanilla/convserative investments. But with the remaining $50,000 I'd like to try something a bit more interesting. I have unlimited risk tolerance for the $50k, provided the investment has "home-run" type upside.
1. Excluding angel investing, what would you do?
2. Assume you have zero experience angel investing, but have a capable technical background. What do you do? How would you build an angel brand for yourself?
1. You need to be situationally positioned well to get decent dealflow.
2. You need to invest in many deals; I have been told that profitable angels do 10+ deals a year.
3. Low-end slices are typically $25k and up. It's a lot of work for companies to wrangle a large number of investors so minimizing that number is to their advantage.
4. It can take YEARS to return anything at all. I've invested in 24 startups since 2007; one exited so far.