Showing posts with label Angel investor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Angel investor. Show all posts

Sunday, February 07, 2016

Top Angel Investment Returns In History

25K Becomes $110 Million In 5 Years

What are the greatest historical angel investment returns?
Jeff Bezos also invested $250,000 in the first angel round in Google and that at today's prices his shares would be worth $1.6 billion. ...... In the hottest angel investment country in the World, the US, last year had some 227,000 angels and pumped $23 billion into start-ups, up 3% from 2004 ..... In 1996 there were only about ten angel groups in the U.S.; today there are more than 200. ....... the 1878 Paris Exhibition, a few highly prominent chaps by the name of J.P.Morgan and Spencer Trask decided to back a crazy idea called “electricity” that was being pitched by none other than Thomas Edison. ....... Back in 1994, there was a guy in the US selling books from his garage via the internet. 12 angels later and Amazon.com was born, 2005 sales were over $5 billion! ......... The second most famous angel investment in recent years (number one to come shortly) was probably the $100,000 check that Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim made out to Google after watching Larry Page and Sergey Brin demonstrate their search-engine software. The check was uncashable at first, as a legal entity, Google didn’t exist yet, but once the company’s incorporation papers were completed and filed, the money enabled Page and Brin to move out of their dorm rooms and into the marketplace. ............ even the likes of Apple, Kinko’s and Starbucks all got their starts with the help of angel investors, as did current rising stars such as Digg, LinkedIn, and Simply Hired. ........ Larry and Sergey .. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department’s loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network. ....... Larry and Sergey continued working to perfect their technology through the first half of 1998. Following a path that would become a key tenet of the Google way, they bought a terabyte of disks at bargain prices and built their own computer housings in Larry’s dorm room, which became Google’s first data center. Meanwhile Sergey set up a business office, and the two began calling on potential partners who might want to license a search technology better than any then available. Despite the dotcom fever of the day, they had little interest in building a company of their own around the technology they had developed........ One portal CEO told them, “As long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t really care about search.” ......

Unable to interest the major portal players of the day, Larry and Sergey decided to make a go of it on their own. All they needed was a little cash to move out of the dorm — and to pay off the credit cards they had maxed out buying a terabyte of memory. So they wrote up a business plan, put their Ph.D. plans on hold, and went looking for an angel investor. Their first visit was with a friend of a faculty member.

.......... Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, was used to taking the long view. One look at their demo and he knew Google had potential — a lot of potential. But though his interest had been piqued, he was pressed for time. As Sergey tells it, “We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, ‘Instead of us discussing all the details, why don’t I just write you a check?’ It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000.” ......... Since there was no legal entity known as “Google Inc.,” there was no way to deposit the check. It sat in Larry’s desk drawer for a couple of weeks while he and Sergey scrambled to set up a corporation and locate other funders among family, friends, and acquaintances. Ultimately they brought in a total initial investment of almost $1 million. ......... That December, PC Magazine named Google one of its Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998. Google was moving up in the world. ......... Google’s appearance on Time magazine’s Top Ten Best Cybertech list for 1999.

Angel Investors: How The Rich Invest
There are currently between 5-7.2 million people in the United States who are accepted as accredited investors. This group of people, which represents as little as 1% of the U.S. population, is made up of wealthy individuals that make $200,000 or more in base salary every year, or maintain a net worth of over $1,000,000. ........ there are currently 756,000 angel investors in the U.S. who have made an angel investment or participated in a friends and family round of financing. ...... the New York Angels require every member to invest at least $50,000 during a 12-month period. ...... during the past 17 years, startups were accountable for creating 65% of the net new jobs. ...... Angel investing is becoming the new venture capital. 50,000 companies were started by seed capital last year while venture capital firms financed only 600.

The origins of angel investing
Since the late 1980s, a growing pool of individuals with moderate wealth have been adding early stage investments to their portfolio. Regardless of whether they are the orthodontist, the real estate flipper, or the middle manager at Boeing or Microsoft, the number of these private investors with truly moderate wealth have been investing in the local economy for over three decades and we are seeing a shift in who is allocating capital from the venture capitalists to the individual investors at the early stage. Many micro VCs or investment partnerships are being built as well as steady growth within the existing network of angel groups. These individuals who used to be lovingly referred to as "Aunt Agatha" and "The rich Uncle" have transcended those nametags and are now providing enough capital for startups to truly get off the ground. ....... during the time-span 1979 to 1995, Fortune 500 companies lost more than four million jobs, yet 24 million jobs were created in the entrepreneurial economy. During that time new business creation rose 200 percent (in comparison with a 17 percent population growth). That is an incredible rise in the affect entrepreneurs have on our economy and it hasn't slowed down since that time frame. .......

in 1874 Alexander Graham Bell used angel money to found Bell Telephone. In 1903 Henry Ford used a $40k investment from five angel investors to launch Ford Motors. In 1977 Apple accepted $91k from a single angel investor to grow. Heck even the Golden Gate Bridge was financed by the angel investor A. P. Giannini after the architect spent 19 years searching for funding.

....... That angel investor who put $91k into Apple received a return of 1,692x their investment (yes $154m). Thomas Alberg received a 260x return on his Amazon.com investment turning $100k into $260m. ....... You can see why investing in 29 losers at $100k makes sense if the 30th investment returns more than 30x.



Thursday, November 05, 2015

David Rose's Unicorn





Monday, October 24, 2011

"Insuring" Angel Investors

An assortment of United States coins, includin...Image via WikipediaThe idea behind insurance is that you pay for auto insurance, I pay for auto insurance, and so do a million other people. Not a million get into accidents. When a few do, it is paid for by all collectively.

Angel investors get screwed by established venture capitalists routinely. In the later rounds the VCs hog the negotiations in ways that people who believed in you early end up getting the short shift. You end up not making money even when the startup does well.

And then there is the no small matter of losing your money entirely because the startup you invested in went down.

It is a numbers game. Startups are known to go down. The best VCs expect at least one third of their startups to go down. And at the outset they have no idea which one third.

Thursday, June 02, 2011

The Mind Of An Entrepreneur

Map of Austin, TexasImage via WikipediaIn search of a consulting gig I am in talks with an early stage entrepreneur in Texas. It is amazing to watch his mind work. He has been active in the space he wants to build his tech startup in for almost a decade. The guy has been immersed. That is a good sign. He has a wonderful slide deck. It really spells out the vision. And he has raised some angel money from his brother.

The passion comes through. The knowledge comes through.

One thing I also noted was the dude is suspicious of VC money. He'd rather not take VC money. That thought process was amusing to me. If you end up facing a situation where you are having to decide if you want to take VC money or not, that is a swell situation to be in. Of course he is just starting, he is not there. But it was something to hear him say that.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Dave McClure's Incubator



Dave McClure is a dude to watch, sure. The guy is a major mover and shaker in the early stage game. You might not do business with him, you might not agree with him, but his insights are hard to ignore.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Twitter Is Amazing For Networking

Twitter logo initialImage via WikipediaTwitter is absolutely the best tool out there for networking. Because it is so low pressure. There is much power in 140 characters.

You do have to know the kind of people you are looking for. In my case I am looking for angel investors. There is The Angel List that everyone knows about. Recently I created one called NYC Angels.

You try to enter into the conversation. Once you locate the herd where you want to hunt, you start replying to tweets. You read articles people have tweeted, and you write back your comments. Most of the time you will get ignored. The fish don't bite. And that's okay.

But I got one big shot to agree to meet me. And I am in talks with another with whom by now I have moved over to email. There is rapport.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Angel Bubbles: No Bubbles

Image representing Y Combinator as depicted in...Image via CrunchBase
Naval Ravikant: There is No Angel Bubble. There are Many Angel Bubbles.: The total amount of additional capital flowing through the Silicon Valley early-stage ecosystem, thanks to Super-Angels and newly minted millionaires, is on the order of half-a-billion dollars or so. It’s no more than a middling-sized VC fund. Would the emergence of a new VC fund be considered a bubble? Would the collapse of one signal disaster? ..... Most of the small companies being funded will fail, but the ones that hit will generate fantastic returns. And because of their small size and operating costs, a greater percentage will be able to get “ramen profitable” than was traditionally possible. ..... we’re all going to have to become even more comfortable with failures, re-starts, and the kind of team re-combination that one sees from one Y Combinator Demo Day to the next. ..... Angel investment valuations have been climbing very quickly ..... a small number of high-profile Angel investments, moving small amounts of capital but at very high valuations, can make the entire market look overvalued. ..... Seed is the new Series A .... an incredible renaissance in technology, with smart phones taking computing to local arenas and social networks taking it into the mainstream populace ..... we’re going to see the equity gap narrow between the founders of raw startups and early key team members.
I think this is new, uncharted territory, rather than bubble territory. Bubble would be if we were a year or two from imminent collapse. I don't think we are.

Monday, November 01, 2010

Dave McClure: Super Angel: Foulmouth

Master Of 500 Hats: July 2010: MoneyBall for Startups: Invest BEFORE Product/Market Fit, Double-Down AFTER.
Super Angels are a recent enough phenomenon that even Paul Graham only very recently wrote about it. There used to be angels and venture capitalists. Super angels have wedged themselves between the two, supposedly wanting to threaten both. Super angels are not your rich uncles, they are not family and friends, they have millions of dollars that they themselves raised, but they are not VCs. They pay way more attention to you than VCs can, they are agile, they have way more money than the traditional angels, and in many cases they are out to make quick money. They are not looking for the next Google, they are looking for the next company Google will buy.

Saturday, October 02, 2010

Paradise City

"There are not going be that many innovating companies coming from the web."
- Peter Thiel
new york craigslist > manhattan > gigs > computer gigs

Do you have the next Facebook? (Upper West Side)

Date: 2010-10-02, 6:09AM EDT
Reply to: gigs-zedgc-1984693979@craigslist.org

I am looking to provide capital and business guidance for the next great idea. I am a successful entrepreneur and can help take a business to the next level.

If you have a business or idea you have been contemplating and are looking for some type of assistance lets connect.

Shoot me an email to start.

Thanks!

Jeff

it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Compensation: Funding
PostingID: 1984693979



Adoption And Missed Opportunities


Peter Thiel: We Would Be A Lot More Careful About Funding Facebook Today. But…: What he meant is that he would think twice about investing in Facebook again because there are not going be that many innovating companies coming from the web. He thinks that a lot of the current big guys, like Google and Yelp, will be at the forefront of innovation and that there’s not many game-changers emerging that will innovate on the web. He tells Lacy, “Yelp of cellphones will be Yelp, the Google of cellphones will be Google.”

TechCrunch: How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today: Facebook will grow without needing to cut into Google’s core business of text ads, which are still 99% of Google’s profits ..... because Madison Avenue’s brands are less interested in targeting than they are in broadcasting to vast mother-loving buckets of demographically correct eyeballs, and Facebook has become the perfect platform for that. ...... Facebook already has more page views than Google. People already spend more time spent on Facebook than Google. ..... For many consumers, Facebook is the Web....... Facebook’s second-mover advantage affords the company the luxury of offering both types of Internet money-making product: Advertising and Commerce..... targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions feed into the next series of even-better-targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions ..... Television advertising represented $60 billion in 2009, or roughly one out of every two dollars spent on advertising in the U.S. ..... Facebook “is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. ..... brand advertising, which accounts for 90 percent of the $600 billion ad market. ..... . Yahoo just paid $1 per like, and buying fans is only going to get more expensive as the lifetime value of a “fan” is better understood. ...... Facebook Credits are poised to be this generation’s American Express .... Facebook is running the real mafia wars, taking 30% while letting the game developers do the heavy lifting. ..... PayPal’s 2009 revenue was $2.8 billion with 87 million active accounts ..... The most famous example of this in our industry is Microsoft’s inability to come to terms with the Web. When Windows and Office were making money hand over fist, text ads were as small as mouse balls. .... in 2004 when Jason Kottke boldly predicted that Google would become “the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years” by selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly utilized map of the web

Hunger, Vision, Money
That StartUp Mentality (2)
That StartUp Mentality
Web 5.0 Is Da Bomb

Friday, September 24, 2010

Scoble Chimes In On Angelgate

Scoble, Longhorn EvangelistImage via Wikipedia
Robert Scoble: The secret hell of tech industry angel investors: when the story broke, I thought it was just Mike being bombastic and trying to make something out of a dinner that he wasn’t invited to..... Mike stumbled into a story that has a ton of undercurrents. ..... The angel investor world is getting HYPER competitive .... Entrepreneurs are seeing access to lots of capital. ..... 10 people just are not going to have enough market power to do anything really naughty although it’s good to nip this problem in the bud, which is why I now support Arrington’s stance.
The early stage investment world is seeing major churn, but I would like a much larger geographical spread, not just on the continent, but globally. It will happen.
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Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Super Angels

Brad Feld: Serious Questions For Super Angels: As individual angel investors made more and more investments, they became super angels. One day a super angel woke up and thought to himself, “Gosh, I could do a lot more investments if I had a fund.” .... Now the micro-VC is a mini-VC. Does this keep scaling, or does the mini-VC succumb to the same challenges that $200 million funds ran into when they turned into $1 billion funds? ..... There’s a renewed focus and interest in early-stage investing going on in the United States



Some of the best bloggers in tech are VCs. I have often wondered as to why the top tech entrepreneurs are not also avid bloggers. It would make sense to avidly blog while you are trying to build a company. But there really are no entrepreneur versions of the top VC blogs. I wish it were otherwise. I felt this while reading this post by Brad Feld, quoted above.

The venture capital worlds has been seeing some major churn. And it is so much fun watching the drama unfold through the various VC blogs. It is gripping. It is like watching a good movie. There is high drama. It is capitalism in action. Blogging has brought forth much transparency to VC action, and that is a good thing.

Early stage investing is seeing some major fermentation. That will impact the VC world in that investing, even at mega scales, will become more hands on. VCs will have to get more involved.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Shopping Around For Iran

AL and IranImage via Wikipedia
Brad Feld and Fred Wilson did not bite - they seem to suggest Iran is not in their domain expertise - but I have a ready presentation in the process, and I have decided to shop around. This is not an investment opportunity. This falls in the public service domain.

I came across a John Boyd blog post while working on this post: Seed Money. And so I emailed him.
You have a great post on seed money ... I followed a link from Fred Wilson's blog to your post. Great post. http://www.blindreason.org/2010/07/rush-to-early-seed-stage-later-stage.html What really got my attention was your putting broadband on the top of the list. I am 15 months from a green card, and 15 months from my startup. My startup will deal with the last mile of the broadband business.

Are you in NYC? Let's meet for coffee some time.

I need you to help me with something. http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2010/07/to-iran-with-love-3.html I need you to put 3-5K into this. This is not an investment. This falls in the public service domain. This is about democracy in Iran.
I also just sent out a whole bunch of tweets to a whole bunch of angel investors. I sent out tweets to all angel investors on the List Of Angels On Twitter. The cut off point was people who had tweeted out in the past 24 hours. If you are not active on Twitter daily, maybe you are not of interest to me.
One Tweet Response

I should not have been, but I was surprised to find so many Indians on the list, including one I am Facebook friends with. 
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Friday, June 11, 2010

Firing Founders: Mostly A Bad Idea

steve jobs co founder of apple computerImage by Annie Bannanie 09 via Flickr
Because-I-can is not a wise use of power.

My first disagreement with Fred Wilson, expressed at some third party blog, about a year ago, was with his assertion that there was too much money in the venture capital business. I find tremendous overlap between his and my thought processes most of the time, and I respect him as a person through our disagreements, and I sure admire his work, but I think I just came across my second major disagreement with Fred.

Fred Wilson: Parting Ways With A Founding Team Member

Fat Can Work, But Lean More Often Does

I am going to paraphrase my summary statement from an earlier debate where I was on Fred's side: firing a founder can sometimes become necessary, but that has to be the exception rather than the norm. Fred seems to think that has to be the norm.
If I look back at our most successful investments over the almost 25 years that I have been in the venture capital business, almost every single one of them has seen a founder or critical founding team member shown the door as the company scaled. It's almost inevitable.
And here Chris Dixon and I seem to stand shoulder to shoulder. I have disagreed with Chris before, fundamentally: Chris Dixon On Twitter: Not Impressive.
(W)ow, Fred, I've never disagreed with one of your posts as much as I do (with) this one. (U)nless a cofounder is deliberately underperforming or engaging in terrible behavior etc you should never fire him/her. (P)ut them in a different role or something if they can't manage/scale.
There are a few things Fred is right about. One, that letting go of an early team member is not easy. And he has put in a lot of sense into how to do it. If you do have to let go a cofounder, do it right. Do it fast, and be generous in the process.
I am in favor of vesting more stock than is contractually obligated to be vested. And severance so the person can take some time and decompress is another way to be generous. Most of all, be generous with the way you talk about the person's contributions. Call them a founder if they are a founder. Recognize their contributions both internally and externally and continue to do so. And help them find another situation where they can work their magic again.
What he has not talked about enough although he has touched upon it is the circumstances in which the cofounder has to let go. He makes it sound like this has to be routine practice, and I find that alarming.
Fred, I guess I see your point to an extent, I can see some instances where a cofounder might need to go. But I'd see your side better if you were to also talk of instances where a founder's departure was a really bad idea. Famous example: Steve Jobs and Apple. A recent example and close to your home: Etsy. Sometimes a charismatic cofounder might be "did in" just because he/she was not adept at the smoke room politics of a big team.
And he has not talked about the alternate which Chris Dixon touches upon. There are alternatives to let go. You could create a new, smaller role for that early team member.

My argument is not that this firing should never happen. I am suggesting this has to be rare, and there has to be a healthy debate as to what the circumstances would be that would warrant such a let go.

Severely diluting angel investors and mercilessly kicking out early team members is not venture capitalism, it is vulture capitalism. All the top tech companies of today have had their founders intact. Sometimes venture capitalists kill or stunt the growth and promise of companies they invest in with their unwise use of power: because-I-can.

Mozart died an early death because he was a creative genius who could not have been adept at the brute force ways of the dumb people around him.

Steve Jobs getting fired by Apple was a terribly bad idea. I have been angry at that Pepsi guy this entire time, and I am someone who has never bought an Apple product. A recent example close at home: why was the Etsy founder brought back? It is a DNA thing. There are people who are good at managing, and good at managing at big scales, and are good at scaling, but they lack the DNA, and that is why they did not start the company they now work for. It is tempting to give all the power to those technocrats, but that can be defeating. You trade muscle for essential DNA.
The Daily Beast: John Sculley On Why He Fired Steve Jobs: “I haven’t spoken to Steve in 20-odd years,” Sculley tells The Daily Beast. “Even though he still doesn’t speak to me, and I expect he never will..."
On that note, I am for a much simpler, transparent formula for the investment climate. That probably is another blog post.

Paul Allen left early for health reasons. Bob Miner was not fired by Larry Ellison, he left on his own. Steve Wozniak, it can be argued, did not scale either. These incidents do not prove Fred Wilson's point, they only disprove another of his pet points, that a company must have a Co-Founder. That is my third major disagreement with Fred. Every historic company has had this one key, indispensable member. That second person was a junior member, an early member, but not a Co-Founder. Companies are not founded by Siamese twins. But, again, that would be another blog post altogether.
Ben Horowitz: Why We Prefer Founding CEOs: The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. .... The macro reason: that’s the way most of the great technology companies have been built ..... founding CEOs consistently beat the professional CEOs on a broad range of metrics ranging from capital efficiency (amount of funding raised), time to exit, exit valuations, and return on investment. ..... why are great technology companies so often run by their founders? And why do professional CEOs sometimes succeed? ...... Professional CEOs are effective at maximizing, but not finding, product cycles. Conversely, founding CEOs are excellent at finding, but not maximizing, product cycles. Our experience shows—and the data supports—that teaching a founding CEO how to maximize the product cycle is easier than teaching the professional CEO how to find the new product cycle....... innovation is the most difficult core competency to build in any business. Innovation is almost insane by definition: most people view any truly innovative idea as stupid, because if it was a good idea, somebody would have already done it. So, the innovator is guaranteed to have more natural initial detractors than followers. ........ the founder’s courage to innovate despite the doubters. ....... Comprehensive knowledge .. Moral authority .. Total commitment to the long-term ..... Great founding CEOs tend to have all three and professional CEOs often lack them. ...... This knowledge is nearly impossible to replicate. Without it, thoughtful people lack the courage to bet the company on entirely new directions......eems totally natural that Larry Ellison transformed Software Development Labs from a consulting business into a software company called Oracle ....... An excellent example of existing, invalid assumptions paralyzing a whole set of companies recently played out in the music industry. ...... Despite this dynamic history, modern record company executives badly missed the most sweeping technical innovation—the Internet. How was that possible? By the time the Internet arrived, all of the original founders of the record companies had been bought out, retired, or died. The new, professional CEOs were unwilling to let go of the most basic assumptions driving the cost structure of their businesses........They were proficient at running the current business, but lacked both the courage and the moral authority to jeopardize the old business model by embracing the new technology. ...... Hastings wasn’t married to the old distribution model precisely because he invented it. ...... Any serious innovation requires a heavy investment. Beyond the up-front cash, costs may include lower growth, bad publicity, and internal grumbling as existing features atrophy. Recently, we’ve seen Facebook’s founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg make a series long-term bets........
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