Piloting Your Life: In-Flight Entertainment (Getting Started in Angel Investing) (Mar 6, 2018)
Welcome Back My Angelic Passengers:
In a meeting recently I was asked about how I split my time between my various business interests and activities and said that I spend about half of my time on investing related activities. I then did the mental math on how many hours that really is and realized that it is about 30 hours a week which is nearly full-time work for some people. I absolutely love it so it doesn’t feel like work but to be a good investor, I believe that I need to spend time on deal sourcing, reviewing decks/viewing pitches, performing due diligence before I invest, advising and mentoring startups, staying current on the startups I’ve invested in and helping them in any way I can, and staying current on industry trends and news. Fortunately I am insatiably curious, love to learn, and am a natural connector so I am ideally suited for the work (it has become much more than a hobby at this point).
What started out as a two year educational venture has resulted in opportunities I wouldn’t have thought possible prior to jumping into angel investing. I need to give a shout out to my dad (Jim Hanson) for getting me started in investing early so that I met the financial requirements to be an accredited investor and to Stu Soffer for suggesting that I get into angel investing. As an aside, my dad introduced me to aviation and I met Stu through flying helicopters. There’s a theme here for sure!
As for where this leads me, the pieces are coming together to form the picture of what I will become in 2019. Why 2019? Because I’ve been working on this pivot for a while now and Susan Sierota of Waggit strongly encouraged (forced) me to set an end date to the pivot when we saw each other at Startup Grind recently so 12/31/18 it is. (I think I need to go meditate to get my heart to stop pounding!)
In-Flight Entertainment: Getting Started in Angel Investing
Tuesday Episode: Not everyone can spend as much time on startup investing but that doesn’t mean that accredited investors interested in investing in this high-risk asset class can’t be a part of it. So, this week I am launching a series on angel investing. I’ve had a number of requests for more information about what angel investing is, what it means to be an angel investor, what I do as an angel investor, and how to become an angel investor. Each week I plan to release a 10–15 minute episode where I will give listeners a window into how I operate as an angel investor. The goal is to answer the questions through the lens of my experiences. These will be in addition to the regular weekly episodes.
