Abdul Golden says emotional investing almost always loses money. Founders and fund leaders are skilled at creating hype to pull in capital, but successful angel investors separate the sales pitch from actual fundamentals and metrics.
The biggest lesson I learned from investing emotionally is that more often than not, you're going to lose money. And then the people who want you to invest there tend to be. The good ones, tend to be really good at tugging on your emotions. That's the biggest thing that I learned. So the charismatic founders or the charismatic venture capital fund leaders or angel syndicate leaders that want to get core investment in deals, they are good at tugging on your emotions to get you hyped to want to make that investment. And that's the biggest thing that I learned, and you really don't think about that, is that everybody is selling something to some extent. And you have to be able to separate the sales pitch and the emotions and separate that from the fundamentals and the tangible aspect of what you're doing, which to me plays into the skill set of angel investing. Right? That's part of the skill set. Part of the skill set is being able to separate that emotion and not let that emotion get to you, not let the hype get to you, because the founder raising funds, they're going to be good at getting you hyped about that investment.
