The American Angel

Here we are in 2017 and only now are we uncovering who the Angel investors really are. The Angel Capital Association (ACA), Wharton School of Business, and Rev1 Ventures sponsored research to let us all know.

The results are not surprising.

78% male
88% white
Average age: 48
Standard check: $25,000
Most live in CA or in and around NYC
The men don’t care about gender (and thus don’t invest in women)
The men don’t care about impact (hence the disparity of capital for impact)

The full detail can be found at www.theamericanangel.org

There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...

“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” (Twain). Wednesday, November 6th, and it feels a bit more repeat than rhyme. Eight years ago I posted Plan 11. It seems apt to reprise that post. 2016 Every event in Seattle this week seems to start with a lamentation of last week’s election results. Three days after posting about #lemonade and I’m getting more funny...

The amazing Berkshire Hathaway set two new huge milestones this week: (i) The stock price of the BRKA shares are now more than $700,000 each, up from $7.50 when Warren Buffett bought his first share in December 1962. And with that (ii) the market cap of the company now exceeds $1 trillion. Quite amazing unto itself, but even more amazing when you look at the other trillion dollar companies of the...

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...