🔍 Why I stopped angel investing after 15 years (and what I'm doing instead)
halletecco.substack.com
Plus: My interview with Oscar co-founder Mario Schlosser
  • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    5·
    3 months ago

    I find that I cannot even begin to relate to the author. If you have the kind of money to throw around that you can meaningfully be an angel investor for 20 - 30 companies, I don’t see why the person wouldn’t just throw the money in index funds and spend their time in a better way. Their third goal is to make more money, but you have to ask at a certain point why it’s beneficial to do so - what does more money get you at that point?

    It seems like with that kind of money they could be free to do whatever they want with their time - investing it all in index funds and live off the interest.

    If they have meaningful contributions to make to founders and desire those relationships, they could meet founders and become a consultant for them, offering business advice or the typical advice they give now. This would enable them to learn and develop deeper relationships (their first two goals) without having to constantly sacrifice on those priorities to maximize their ROI (like having to spread their investments across 30 companies, making the relationships shallow and undermining their opportunities to learn and embed in the company).

    I can understand wanting to have deep and meaningful relationships, and wanting to learn and be involved in innovative development - those goals make sense to me. It’s the third goal that has me puzzled.

    As far as I can tell the only thing that the angel investing is offering them is that it forces founders to be friends with them and involve them, the money is coercive that way - so if the author otherwise has no meaningful contributions to make, they can still force a social dynamic where they have authority with the founders and to be in their business (literally). Maybe their money, rather than their advice, is what is primarily worthwhile and opening doors to relationships and learning for them.

    But then I would say this is a poor way to achieve the goals of deeper relationships and learning: instead, use your economic privilege to get the kind of education that does make you a valuable person to work with, and then consult.

    I’m just shocked someone would feel making more money is a top priority once they have that much money - something strikes me as fundamentally wrong there.