51–60 of 237 posts
Why did you get into angel investing? (also, do you talk to yourself often?)
I wanted to try to figure out of I was going to be a professional investor someday. I discovered that the hardest part for me is saying "no" a whole lot.
Yes, I do talk to myself.
Rate of good versus bad pitches you get?
Lots of bad entrepreneurs have problems that prevent me from actually seeing the pitch itself anyway.
I prefer to see prototypes, anyway. This keeps a LOT of crap out of the way.
* Was delicious boot strapped?
* How do you feel about a publishing co (a la O'Reilly or PeepCode) as an investment?
* What is your favorite investment to date? * Was delicious boot strapped? * How do you feel about a publishing co (a la O'Reilly or PeepCode) as an investment?
They're all my favorites. I try not to do the ones I hate.
The ones that seemed very obvious to me on first conversation were Etsy, Weatherbill, and Twilio.
> delicious bootstrapped
I worked on it for two years before raising funding. But I did raise VC.
> a publishing co
Feels like a long slog. I'm not fond of content as a business.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great. Any thoughts on parameter values?
According to Fred, 2 in 3 startups return even or fail, and 1 in 3 succeed. Assuming I'm doing as well as he is (which I doubt) and that an exiting startup gets 10x the input, the formula suggests 25% or so. This seems high. Also, startups are not independent bets. Who knows? I've done 34-ish investments. One small exit. Two are doing very well. Two or three dead companies (sometimes, it is hard to tell.)
I guess that makes me a junior associate at best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess anything that works. In my experience, companies raising less than 500k are making a huge mistake.
Why do you think that?
An entrepreneur going this route is not making good trade-offs.
In my experience, most of these companies fail.
What's something a startup has done that most surprised you by working when you expected it not to work?
What's the most unexpected thing you've learned along the way?