The Playfair Angel Community Explained
We launched our angel community last month and held our first AMA. Now we want to set out a little more about how we see the community working and how you can get involved. If you’re an active angel that hasn’t registered, click here.
Our vision for the Playfair Angel Community is to be a place where angels can share investment opportunities, learn from their peers (and us), and spend time getting to know each other at our regular social events.
You can read more about our ‘Access For All Angels’ philosophy here.
So how exactly is it going to work in practice?
What am I going to get out of it?
How do I contribute?
We’ve tried to answer these top level questions and those asked at our first AMA below. If you have any others, please contact us: angels@playfair.vc
Access to curated opportunities
We will share direct investment opportunities via email from time to time that match the criteria you submitted when your registered with us.
There will be two types of opportunity:
Playfair is investing and (co-)leading the round
We will share with the founder a list of angels that are a match for the round based on your previous experience, sector expertise and areas of interest. The founder will review and, based on their individual approach, we will then make direct introductions for you to speak with the founder.
We only make 6–8 investments per year so you should expect a low volume of well targeted companies. You can read more about our approach here.
We aim to reserve 10% of our allocation for angels in every round.
Playfair is not investing, but it could be attractive
We will share via email a small numbers of companies each year that we are not investing in, but nevertheless could be attractive for an angel.
There are many reasons an investment is not for us (portfolio conflict/ overlap, concerns about ultimate exit potential, etc.), but could be a good fit for an angel and other funds. If you are keen to find out more about the company, reply to our email and we will connect you with the founder.
If you haven’t yet done it, please add your angel experience to your LinkedIn profile and ensure it’s updated. This ensures that when we share your profile with founders they are seeing the best online version of you.
If you want to share opportunities (pitch decks) with us, you can do this directly via angels@playfair.vc which is always monitored by the team 🙏
Market updates and other educational events
We’ll hold regular AMA sessions with the Playfair team (like the one we held earlier this month) as well as peer to peer sessions where you can learn from other angels in the ecosystem.
This is an area we are looking to build out over the coming months, so if you have ideas for events that would be beneficial for you, please do share.
Invitations to our social events
Being an angel can be quite a lonely experience so we want to use our social events to bring you together with your peers. No agenda. Only the shortest of welcome comments. And a relaxed environment open to everybody in our community. The first one is in Central London on 21 November and we’re looking forward to seeing many of you there. Invites to follow.
Post-AMA FAQs:
- Will you be providing detailed investment memos and/or recordings of calls with founders?
No — we are not organising a syndicate, but making direct introductions between angels and founders. One of the aims of the community is to support active investors to increase their experience and exposure to founders.
2. Will there be an online community like Slack or WhatsApp?
No — we find these to be generally distracting and noisy. Our aim is not to provide you with another busy online channel to monitor, but selected companies, educational events and socials. It’s the kind of simple, centrally coordinated community we would have liked when we were angels.
3. What’s the minimum angel cheque?
This is determined by the founder of the company you are speaking to. In general, we see £5k as an absolute minimum, but £25k is also common.
4. What areas do you typically invest in and will you look at ‘overlooked spaces’?
All here: https://playfair.vc/approach.php
5. How many people are in the community?
Several hundred so far. We’ll be doing some detailed analysis on the membership 12 months from now to ensure we are attracting a broad mix of profiles and particularly less experienced and underrepresented angels.
6. How long do you plan to run the imitative for?
It’s not an initiative, but a community. We intend to run it for the long term and have already been working with angels for the past decade.
