Winning Angels: The Seven Fundamentals of Early-State Investing

by David Amis, Howard H. Stevenson, Howard Stevenson

Winning Angels is a practical, hands-on guide to angel investing, which includes tools, tactics and strategies for high-tech, low-tech, and every other kind of early-stage investing. Over 50 winning angels in the US and Europe, including Mitch Kapor, Esther Dyson, Andrew Filipowski, Audrey MacLean, and Dick Morley, share their hard-earned years of experience. Some have done over 100 deals each, while others reaped rewards on investments in companies such as Apple Computer, Amazon.com, RealNetworks, idealab!, StarMedia Network, Kozmo.com, returning on occasions several hundred times their original investment. Winning Angels reduces the art of angel investing into a science, and opens the doors to those angels who have limited experience, while augmenting the experience of seasoned investors. Entrepreneurs will benefit by reading and reflecting on the contents of the book before they seek funding. They will gain access to the mindset of winning angels, and how best to win them over, as well as finding information on how to value, structure and harvest their deals. David Amis, who has made 15 angel investments, previously served as the Managing Director of Venture Capital Report Ltd, which has matched over 300 entrepreneurs with angels. He currently invests individually and through StartUpFund I, where he serves as the Managing Partner. As an entrepreneur, he has raised over $10m from more than 100 individual investors. Howard Stevenson, who has made over 80 angel investments, headed the Entrepreneur Management Unit at Harvard Business School for 18 years. He is a leading thinker in the areas of entrepreneurship and angel investing and has authored/co-authored six books, his latest is Do Lunch or Be Lunch, and 43 articles.

Genres: Business

400 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2001

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that has good and bad in it. There is some good advice and quite a few interesting ideas. However this is blurred by the apparent desire of the authors to give the reader a idea of all the different options and approaches. Sometimes they are clear about the pros / cons, but not always and they rarely give a view as to which will work better for more people.

Its also worth noting that this was written at the peak of the dot com bubble. While this doesn't necessarily make ideas and concepts that the book talks about useless, some elements have not dated well. In particular, some of the 'successes' that investors talk about might not have been called that in a later edition. And the market structure has evolved rather dramatically.

Hard to recommend, but far from being terrible.

[Tony Kauffmann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't read it fully but speed read about 75% of it, enough to see that it was a waste of time. It's 50% advice and 50% quotes from experience angel investors. The problem is the advice from all the different angels contradicts each other or is too vague to be useful.

Someone will say "I never do XYZ" and in the very next sentence another investor will saw "meh, XYZ is fine, I've done it many times, depends on the circumstance." The book and the investors can't agree at all on how to structure the best terms for a deal, or whether or not to negotiate and how to negotiate if desired, so the reader really isn't in a better position than when they began.

Some terms and concepts were useful to me, but there was no specific advice in how to apply them. "It depends on the deal" (without any details on criteria to affect the situation one way or another) is the entire thrust of this book in 5 words.