I Became an Active Angel Investor Without Being a Millionaire.
Ihave been working in Start-ups since 2014. My last job was Country Manager for the german-speaking markets at Trainline, a company that eventually IPO’d for 2B€ on the London Stock Exchange in 2019.
I always wanted to participate even more in the ecosystem by investing in promising early-stage startups. Become an Angel Investor. Even though I didn’t know what it meant back then, the term had this magic aura to me. In 2018, I finally decided to jump ship.
Fast forward to 2020, I saw hundreds of pitch decks, did some good deals, and some less good ones. But most importantly, I learned a ton by speaking to many great investors and entrepreneurs.
The good news is that you don’t need to be a millionaire to become a business angel, but there are a lot of pitfalls.
Here is what I learned.
1. Start small
It can be tempting to throw money at every pitch deck that you receive. There are tons of Start-ups looking for funding every day, in every sector and country on the planet. While everybody talks about the insane multiples achieved by early investors in rocketships like Uber (>2500x), nobody talks about the failures. There is a very high probability that 9 companies out of 10 in your portfolio will eventually…
