Tag Archives: value

Guide to Angel Investing

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I’ve been dabbling in startup investing for a few years now. Nothing extraordinary, and I’ve definitely not made it a career, but I have developed a guide of sorts that I follow when making the final decision of whether or not to invest.

This is written from the viewpoint of a single angel investor. Here it is:

  1. Risk: Understand the high risk in angel investing. Mentally, assume you’ll write off all investments as soon as you make them. Invest only what you can afford to lose.
  1. Avoid life-support investing: If a company comes for funding, where the founder says/implies something to the extent of: “fund us or we’re going out of business” – usually gravitate to not investing. Life support investing is a bad idea (not to mention stressful!).

Lean towards companies that will survive regardless of whether or not you invest in them.

  1. Three companies come in for funding:

A – Entrepreneur has the best idea ever! They need funds to build the product.

B – Entrepreneur has the best product ever! They need funds to market.

C – Entrepreneur has a product which shows great traction. They need funds to                    scale.

Everything else equal, investing in C has the most promise.

  1. Follow-up investor: For the new investor, prefer being a follow up investor rather than leading rounds.
  1. Investment hierarchy: First invest in companies with great traction. If that does not exist in the options, then invest in those with great people, followed by those with a great product.
  1. Bet on people rather than product: Early stages, funding is a bet on people rather than product. Products can change more easily than people.
  1. Never invest in something you don’t understand: Doesn’t matter what it is, who is involved, who has invested or how well the market is going.
  1. Entrepreneurial grit matters: Invest in entrepreneurs who show they’ll simply never give up on the company – no matter what. Perseverance is crucial. When things get hard (and in startups they will!), you want someone who has the grit to stick through it to figure a way out.
  1. Scaling: Always think about how the company can scale. If scaling is expensive or hard, lean towards not investing.
  1. Avoid niches: Niche markets are starting points – but that’s it. The ultimate market cannot remain in a niche space. Successful companies need to scale.
  1. Viable business or science project?: Is the company capable of being a business or will it remain a technology/project? Not all technologies can become businesses.
  1. The Fence: If you’re on the fence about a company for a long time – defer the investment.
  1. Entrepreneur’s knowledge: The entrepreneur needs to know more about the space than you. If you seem to know more about his own space – that’s a red flag.
  1. First versions will suck: Products require several iterations of trials and failure to become great. The key is if the entrepreneur/team is unfazed by failure to keep at it despite the obstacles.
  1. What if Google/FB does it?: Assume the incumbent is always going to copy the entrepreneur if he does well. What is his strategy?
  1. Does the product create delight?: Do you feel delighted when you use the entrepreneur’s product or service? If not, at least do the customers absolutely love the product? Defer the investment until that is true.
  1. Simple enough for your mother: Can your mother use the entrepreneur’s product or service? Simplicity is key for widespread adoption.
  1. Failure is a learning process: Past failures > No failures.
  1. Return time period: Expect returns no less than 5-7 years.
  1. Differentiate between the decision and outcome: Decisions must be taken using all information available to you at that time. You can’t predict the future and hindsight is always 20/20. A bad outcome does not necessarily mean a bad decision and vice versa. Don’t beat yourself up too much over a bad outcome, and then again don’t let a good outcome go to your head.

Good luck! And as always, if you do discover the next Google or Facebook, do let me know! 😉

With that said, here is the obligatory legal disclaimer that goes with any investment advice – Please invest at your own risk! 

Solving a user problem vs a technical problem: the difference between creating value and wasting your time

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What is the kind of problem you are working tirelessly to solve? Are you actually working to create value or simply wasting your time? The difference is in the end goal of what solving the problem accomplishes. Some very big user problems have fairly simple technical solutions. They are easy to use, solve an actual need and fairly simple to interact with. On the other hand, some very big technical problems really don’t end up doing much for the end user. The former gives you something that people want, while the latter gives you an extremely beautiful piece of crap.

Engineers are particularly susceptible to this. It is natural to fall into the trap of believing that just because something is challenging from a technical perspective, it must be a valuable problem to solve. From a user’s perspective, all that’s important is that the product does what it is meant to. “How” really doesn’t matter. If you are selling mousetraps, does it get rid of the mice better than everyone else? If yes, that’s great. Users aren’t going to care much of what happens within the product as long as it works. You can spend all your time trying to create a very advanced, state of the art, nuclear powered mousetrap that creates mini fission explosions to obliterate the mice, but at the end if it doesn’t get rid of the mice, is unwieldy or uneconomical, no one’s buying it. It’ll be an extremely cool project no doubt, but at the end of the day, a fairly useless one!

Every problem that you solve should tie back to the user and/or to enhance their end experience. Be careful of not getting stuck in your own technical world that is insulated from the user completely. Though it does vary by industry, for consumer facing products more specifically – it is the end user who is king. It is easy to get lost in day to day technical, legal, product, financial, investment problems, but if what you’re working on doesn’t help the end user – you’re not moving forward.

Expressed in slightly broader terms, whenever you look at a hard problem, you need to assess its value independently to determine whether it is truly worth your effort. Becoming the top restaurant in the city: Is it hard? Of course! But how valuable is it given that the next 10 best restaurants are almost always going to be head to head with you?

Passionate engineers, by nature, get excited by challenging technical problems. However, take care that you never lose sight of the user so you don’t end up spending all your effort on creating something which doesn’t end up doing anything.

On the flipside, thinking from a user’s perspective brings focus, where the complicated tasks that you were dreading, often no longer seem to be relevant or worth pursuing. It simplifies things! Not everything is wrong with the world… 🙂