This almost makes it seem like angel investing has some risk associated with it.
But seriously, this is about as low content as a post as you could imagine:
- Angel investors regret bad decisions
- Angel investors want lower valuations
- Angel investors want less "hot air" (which is ironic because most media sources highly recommend you "hustle" when raising money)
All of this is obvious. And a company that is replacing the guesswork of valuing early-stage companies with their own arbitrary guesswork doesn't strike me as an upgrade, especially since I'm sure they take a cut somehow.
In fact, since it's saying that "50% of angel investors regret at least one investment this year", that could be taken to mean that the other 50% of angel investors are being too conservative with their investments: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/11/loss-ratios-in-early-stage-v...
This assumes that angel investors have the same incentives as institutional VC firms do, which is not always the case, but I'm just highlighting how silly it is to have a headline that "only" 50% of angel investors this year have no regrets.
The silliest part of the article is actually buried in the graph: the number-one reason people regret angel investments is that the company's "financial projections [were] overly optimistic."
All financial projections in an early startup's pitch deck are going to be overly optimistic. That's because it's a startup, not an established company with a proven business model. Angels shouldn't be filtering for degree of optimism in the projections, which are mostly meaningless at this stage. They should be filtering for the underlying assumptions in the projections. It's about the inputs in the model (strategic, human, and technological) -- not the exactitude of the projected outputs.
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This almost makes it seem like angel investing has some risk associated with it.
But seriously, this is about as low content as a post as you could imagine:
- Angel investors regret bad decisions
- Angel investors want lower valuations
- Angel investors want less "hot air" (which is ironic because most media sources highly recommend you "hustle" when raising money)
All of this is obvious. And a company that is replacing the guesswork of valuing early-stage companies with their own arbitrary guesswork doesn't strike me as an upgrade, especially since I'm sure they take a cut somehow.
Yes, this is a very silly article.
In fact, since it's saying that "50% of angel investors regret at least one investment this year", that could be taken to mean that the other 50% of angel investors are being too conservative with their investments: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/11/loss-ratios-in-early-stage-v...
This assumes that angel investors have the same incentives as institutional VC firms do, which is not always the case, but I'm just highlighting how silly it is to have a headline that "only" 50% of angel investors this year have no regrets.
The silliest part of the article is actually buried in the graph: the number-one reason people regret angel investments is that the company's "financial projections [were] overly optimistic."
All financial projections in an early startup's pitch deck are going to be overly optimistic. That's because it's a startup, not an established company with a proven business model. Angels shouldn't be filtering for degree of optimism in the projections, which are mostly meaningless at this stage. They should be filtering for the underlying assumptions in the projections. It's about the inputs in the model (strategic, human, and technological) -- not the exactitude of the projected outputs.