Angels working like VCs?

Filed in archive Venture Capital on January 8, 2006

Paul Allen hints me to this Business Week article that implies the move of investing Angels 'up the food chain' to invest more like VCs:

"Many angels took big hits after 2000 as Internet-related businesses Crashed and burned. For investments that survived the carnage associated with the Nasdaq decline, more problems surfaced when the entrepreneurs and their angels sought venture capital to finance additional growth. The VCs routinely insisted on "down round" -- valuations lower than what the angels had originally accepted. All of this prompted angels to organize themselves and seek out more legal protections, the kind that have long been standard for VCs.

The transformation of the angel community is quite radical, historically speaking. William Wetzel, a retired University of New Hampshire business professor and the first academic to seriously research angel investing, used to bemoan in his research studies the difficulty entrepreneurs faced in finding angel investors. They tended to be lone rangers, or else they just invested with a few close friends or colleagues."

While I'm sure several active angels (or angel groups) have followed this route and have tried to do less riskier albeit bigger deals the last months have opened up a new (or rather not so new) niche. As David Galbraith and other have noted before the gap of exits with less than $50 million in exit value is that many VCs find to small to shoot for can be a great place for angels.

Jeff Clavier is somebody who has understood this new niche very well. I'm sure many other angels will follow to invest in smaller (and often leaner) outfits that can produce a decent ROI with exits smaller than $50 million.