The Invisible League Table: Why Some Angels Quietly Beat the Rest, and What Their Motivation Has to Do With It
She’d been in the syndicate longer than I had, and she had no idea she was losing. We were having coffee, the good kind, in one of those Edinburgh places that charges you for the privilege of sitting down. She’s younger than most of our members, sharp, does something clever in professional services that pays […]
The £340,000 Habit: What Angel Investing Research Really Says About Due Diligence and Returns
Most angel investors would have done better in a tracker fund. The research has said so for the better part of two decades, and most angels have smiled politely and carried on. That sentence should annoy you. Good. It’s meant to. Because the interesting thing about angel investing isn’t that it’s risky, which everyone knows, […]
Thirty years of UK angel research describes the same problem.
Most of the industry is still working around it. There’s a paper Colin Mason and his collaborators published in 2017 that does something quietly devastating. They asked 238 UK angel investors why they’d declined deals. Seventy-one per cent of the rejections came down to one or two reasons. Across the two surveys, between fifty-nine and […]
Berkus to AI – Why Early Stage Valuation Keeps Getting More Sophisticated And No More Accurate
Every angel investor has had this moment. You agree a pre-money valuation. You sign the paperwork. And you know, somewhere behind the eyes, that the number wasn’t calculated. It was negotiated. The framework gave you cover. The framework was the negotiation. You probably wouldn’t say so over dinner. You might say it after a second […]
The £100,000 Startup Race is the structural opposite of a pitch competition, and that’s the point
Why the UK has spent thirty years running the one mechanism Colin Mason’s evidence says does not work. And what a programme designed for how angels actually decide looks like instead. There is a particular kind of British invention – the pitch competition – that has achieved, over thirty years, an almost perfect record of […]