Creating Angels

Out of the 320 million Americans, fewer than 320,000 are Angel investors, investing in startups. Quick math, that is less than 0.1% of all Americans. The ratio only gets worse elsewhere in the world.

Why? Investing in startups is complicated. Historically, it’s a skill learned in an ad hoc apprenticeship, with new Angels observing more experienced Angels for months or years. Few people have the time and patience for that form of learning.

Now there is a new, far more efficient path to learn how to be an Angel, The Angel Accelerator, a path that takes the learnings from startup accelerators and applies them to teaching how to invest in startups.

And not just one path, but a whole (new) network of paths. Here at the start of 2021, there are three to choose from: USA, Canada, and Africa.

USA and Africa on Wednesdays, March through mid-May. Details at theangelaccelerator.com/when. Two more free webinars in February. Many free video lessons to see what startup investing is about at theangelaccelerator.com/lessons, including these three topics:

RSVP to all the free webinars at rsvp.theangelaccelerator.com

Back in the dot-com bubble, my second-ever startup filed the paperwork to go public, but the NASDAQ topped off before we were able to complete that process. It’s long been a life goal to be part of a company to finish that process. That goal was not only achieved today, but by Africa Eats, my eighth startup. I’m now CEO of a public company. 🙂 Africa Eats is an investment company...

The buzzword of 2024 is “AI” and like social, mobile, cloud, fintech, and blockchain, every startup is claiming to have it and every big startup fundraising is claiming to expand what can be done with it. Or in short, we’ve been here before. A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle does a very good job explaining how this will play out in 13 steps, and how it already played...

The standard structure for private equity funds (and venture capital funds) is “2&20”, as in a 2% management fee (±1%) and 20% (±10%) of the profits, a.k.a. “carried interest“. Why 20% of the profits? Henry Kravis of KKR explains below, starting at 6:00. TL;DR: Necessity, as he and his partners had no capital to put at risk. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens...

Other people, see things and . . . say ‘Why?’ . . . But I dream things that never were– and I say: ‘Why not?’ – George Bernard Shaw This has shown in my 30+ year career repeatedly. Most recently a few months ago, when pondering the “Missing Middle” of capital for startups in general, and SMEs in Africa specifically. Why? Why is it taking so long for...

Venture capital funds often tout cash-on-cash returns of 2x-3x over 10 years. That is the supposed “norm” for successful funds. But despite the industry being tracked investment by investment in detail, the industry as a whole is notoriously opaque when it comes to the returns of the funds. Thank you to Dan Gray (@credistick) who tweeted the following table, with data from 1981...