Guide to Super Angels - Who they are and what they invest in

chubbybrain.com

33 points·asanwal··6 comments

This point has been made before, but I think it's time to stop calling any angel investor a super angel. The line between angel and VC is already quite small. Do we need a tinier margin between?

Thanks for reading.

Yes - we tend to agree. But it seems that the term "super angel" has entered the vernacular to some extent although even its definition remains a bit nebulous.

Mark Suster had a post where he mentioned if you have a fund, you're a VC, and if you invest your own money, you're an angel. That's a nice clean demarcation between the two in our opinion as well. Maybe we'll coalesce on a nice clean definition in the near future.

That said, if you are an angel investor, super angel is much better branding :)

I think that at the very least, a super angel needs a halo, tights and a cape.

Well if we're going to start coming up with different grades of angel, we can at least use the thousands of years' worth of existing terms. The level above "Angel" is "Archangel".

Then it's Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubim and finally Seraphim (the exact order can vary, but I'm going with Dante).

That should provide enough fuel for angel-on-angel one-upmanship for now. (If not, we can move on to the Jewish angelology, which includes four additional ranks above Seraphim.)

I still think it's funny because most of these "Super Angels" don't invest their own money. They are Micro VC's if you want to call them anything different.

Simon - The list compiled in this post is of people who've raised actual funds and so who are not just investing their own money.

Micro VCs seems to be a more apt description but the popular/tech media def seems to have gravitated towards the term super angel.

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