How to Angel Invest, Part 2 | Hacker News Reader

How to Angel Invest, Part 2

nav.al

79 pointsjger1524 comments

Some anecdata: I know 8 people who angel invest (small sample yes) and 0 have made money.

To heighten your chances you're going to need to write 20-40 checks which means about a $500k investment. And then curl up in to a fetal position till 1 > 20x at least to break even.

You’re exactly right. Portfolio size is absolutely the key here. To give yourself a fighting chance of finding an outlier-type return, you need to have some diversification... Gerry Neumann did a great post breaking down some of the math on this[0].

[0] http://reactionwheel.net/2017/12/power-laws-in-venture-portf...

Not to mention having that 500k tied up for around 6-8+ years...

Add one more to your sample (me) 8-(

> If you have poor judgment, you won’t know it.

I'm pretty sure I have bad judgment of the sort that would make me a bad angel investor.

I'm too trusting of people and too motivated to invest in things I would find technically interesting rather than those that could be viable businesses.

Getting screwed by untrustworthy people would be more misses. But returns are made on the hits, so I don't think that would matter.

Definitely the latter issue of investing in something technically interesting would matter a great deal. Maybe you're seeing a wave before others with your insight. But maybe you focus on the tech and not the traction or the path to scale. But knowing the tech is an advantage!

Angel investing needs to be automated and commoditized.

I believe the focus on having superior foresight and personalities in this space are nonsense, especially when we have over 40 years of actuarial data to study from.

The known knowns and known unknowns of angel investing should be well modellable by now, just like flood risk. This should translate to fund structures, deal terms and milestone expectations that can be made transparent and standardized across geographies and across industries.

I would like to see angel investment being accessible to A LOT more people than the lucky few in Silicon Valley. If portfolio size is the best determinant of success, imagine an angle fund the size of Blackrock.

Part 1: > Dealflow and access are the most important things to work on as an investor. Your judgment doesn’t have to be that great, because the returns follow a power law. And you can always get capital if you have good dealflow and access.

Part 2: > At the end of the day, judgment is the single most important thing. It’s more important than access to deals and access to capital.

Great advice from Naval and Nivi. If you ever considered angel investing, they cover many of the pitfalls. Invest wisely.

Just chase founders with big Twitter follows && chasing top angel investors.

This dude is the absolute worst. His brand is taking the platitudes of a "wellness influencer" and applying it to tech and investing. He uses logic/rhetorical fallacies to say things that sounds smart/deep that dont say anything. He also, anoints himself at every turn.

He's a walking manifestation of the reputation tech has built as being elitist and out of touch.

Please don't do generic tangents or personal attacks on HN. Those are two of the worst influences on an internet forum.

If you don't like this article, there are lots of others to read here.

The irony of your generic complaint followed by overstatement about my what you believe to be my generic complaint is genuinely fun.

This isnt a character attack, it's a substantive attack. And you should care. This ego maniac has his sights set on being the representative talking "tech guy" at the highest form of culture. He was a featured guest on Joe Rogan spouting his empty rhetoric and he indirectly represents us.

I don't see anything substantive about it. Yes, moderation comments are ironic, but alas we can't do without them (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) I don't know who 'us' is supposed to be; he doesn't represent me, and I assume he doesn't represent you. By the way, the issue with personal attacks is not so much the person, as what they do to the community. Maybe you don't owe Naval better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it. We need to take care of the commons, which suffers enough as it is.

I agree. I found Naval to offer little to none actionable tips and his idea of meritocracy is just out of touch with reality.

You nailed it. I am still trying to figure out what his take is on Covid-19. He doesn't seem to offer any concrete solution/opinion to anything really.

I get your opinion but don’t get how to conclude that he is absolutely worst ? He can choose to be whatever, he is obviously successful and spreading his beliefs makes him true to how he lives his life.

I don't understand why you would want to bring this attitude of tearing people down into a community centered on building things up.

Naval's Twitter feed is like a Deep Neural Network based Quote generator. I guess his thread of How to become rich trended everywhere but I'm not sure how many really got anything practically applied with those things. He very much reminds Silicon Valley (HBO) to me. Is it how usually VCs talk or it's just an image of an Angel Investing Monk that he's building?

It's a genuine question I've got (Someone who lives far away from the Bay area)

I think this is an unfair representation of Naval. If you only look at Twitter of course you will only find short messages, that's precisely what Twitter is about!

Listen to this interview to Naval if you want a long format: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/naval-ravikant/

Someone on Twitter recently called it the "tech bro version of white girl quotes". Maybe I'm getting a limited view on him through only sometimes seeing the Tweets but they seem pretty general and I don't see how people can get anything useful out of them.

More to it.

His After on podcast interview is great --

https://after-on.com/episodes-31-60/045

If you say as little as possible people will reflect their own beliefs in the words and you just can't be wrong.

People have made millions using just this little fact right here. Pose as an expert and say most generic BS and let people do the mental gymnastics to have it match their world view.

A starter pack would include gems like, "any person who have wanted something bad enough has gotten it", "never let anyone tell you your dreams are just that", "success is right after the point when you give up", "only if you knew you were destined for tres comas club" etc.

Please join my course on life-coaching if you are interested in this field.

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