Efficient VC

Stories from my journey into the world of angel investing, spanning 17 investments over 12 months. Founder-first (for over a decade) at Efficient App. Slightly obsessed with product, automation, and integration.

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Is The End Goal Starting A Fund Of My Own?

Shortly after learning more about the venture capital space and (making my first angel investment), I thought for sure that I’d want to start my own fund. I was practicing patience though. I just started my journey, so I’d have to be out of my mind to think I’ve earned the right to manage other people’s money. Patience is something that I am good at though: I am a long-term-focused person in everything I do. So all I have to do right now is focus on deriving happiness from my own angel investments.

Something strange started happening though. After making a few more investments and talking more publicly about angel investing (while continuing to learn). I started to get a lot of people asking me the following question:

When are you going to start your own fund? And when you do, can I invest?

Wait, what…? Now, we aren’t just talking about friends and family here… Let’s take the...

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5 Answers to Questions You Have About Starting to Angel Invest

I get these questions a lot. Like a lot a lot. Questions that I also had when first researching the angel investment space. So here’s an aggregated list of top questions I’ve gotten since starting.

  1. How do you decide to invest in early-stage startups, and how do you access opportunities in that space?
  2. What are the investment minimums for early-stage angel investing?
  3. Should I invest in a fund?
  4. How do you know you’re signing an agreement that is “safe”? Do you have a lawyer review?
  5. How do you transfer money to complete the investment?

1. How’d you decide to invest in early-stage startups, and how do you get access to opportunities in that space

Just to quickly explain what “early-stage investing” means, it can be anywhere from idea-phase (pre-product) all the way to pre-PMF (Product-Market Fit). This would usually be a Pre-seed/Seed/Series A (but you are usually getting closer to PMF...

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How I Made My First Angel Investment

I made my first ever investment back in 2013 (I was 21).

No, this wasn’t an angel investment. I bought a company on the NASDAQ that I loved. Research In Motion (though you may better know them as BlackBerry).

Why, might you ask? Well - I started my first business (CyberBytes Inc.) in June of 2010, and I thought having a BlackBerry made me a more legitimate business owner (back in high school), because, well, I could write emails more efficiently with the physical keyboard. Right?

I lost a lot of money from my first investment

By a lot, I mean the $4,000 investment turned into something like $2-3k

And hey, that was a lot of money for me back then - I only made $5-10k/yr for my first four years in business. But that’s a story for another day.

Even with the major losses on paper, that wasn’t enough to keep me away from starting the unofficially-official weekly BlackBerry podcast. We...

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