You’re Going to Lose Money Angel Investing, Unless You Educate Yourself

After speaking with many notable angel investors, I now realize I invested $50,000 inefficiently. Maybe more than that.

Who am I kidding, it is more than that.

The truth is, with early stage investing, we won’t know the results for a few years.

Looking back, I’ll tell you where I went wrong: mediocre deal flow, pre-product/pre-traction, lack of domain knowledge, inconsistent check sizes, FOMO etc.

Angel investing is hard. It takes lots of experience, and that experience doesn’t come cheap.

No matter how good you think you are, chances are you aren’t. No matter how good you think your deal flow is, chances are it’s not.

That’s why I started investing alongside successful and well-known angels via AngelList. If great angels invest in great people that produce great companies, I want to invest with THOSE great angels. I don’t believe in “play” money. I definitely don’t believe in “Fuck You” money. Money I lose is “Fuck Me” money.

Every dollar spent or invested has an identified risk, or at least it should.

There is a lack of education in the private investment space.

New investors are pouring money into early stage deals, in hopes of finding the next unicorn. Seed investing IS a great thing. There are fantastic entrepreneurs out there building great companies. There are also smart investors who help them get to the next stage of their startup life.

At the same time, there are investors who throw money at not-so-great entrepreneurs and their ideas and that is a disservice to the ecosystem. They lack the passion, ethos and understanding of how this community works.

We’re seeing higher valuations and burn rates, which Bill Gurley has openly called out on more than one occasion. We can help calm that “frothy” environment through education. We don’t know if there’s a bubble until it happens.

In the meantime, we can educate new investors on how to invest their money in startups and how it’s about investing in awesome founders. We can educate entrepreneurs on why building a great company is more important than valuation and $’s raised.

The sharing of knowledge is the future of wealth management.

I created the Future Investor Angel Course to educate new investors on how to angel invest the right way, using AngelList. This is an in-depth set of lessons that’s going to breakdown everything about angel investing and AngelList.

I want to save you thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars that you could otherwise invest inefficiently. I learned this the hard way. But now some of the best angel investors are sharing their insight and knowledge with us.

This Startup World that we all love is a beautiful thing. Let’s not mess it up.