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.