Angel investors should be available to help but not meddle with the teams they back. Startups sometimes lie about their data, like Theranos did. The best angels make introductions to bigger investors and trust their founders to run the company.
let alone have they organized them in a way that's easy for you to digest, you know, right? That's from the company side. And then, you know, I already talked about honesty, but, you know, I don't think they need to say be honest, you know, right? But you'd be surprised that sometimes, uh, and I'm not just talking the Theranos of the world, I'm talking about the baby Theranos of the world where, you know, there was just numbers usually that are totally misrepresented or that lawsuit with a former founder that they forgot to tell you about, or insert many different examples that Neal Bloom and I could share from the field. As an investor, I think the responsibility post-funding is to be accessible but not intrusive. So, you've written your check, you're not running the company. You believed in the management team who you funded enough to be comfortable parting with your hard-earned cash. You can be helpful to them, and the data shows, especially for earlier stage angel investing, that the involvement and the support can actually positively correlate with the outcomes of the company. So it is something more than just writing a check, especially as an angel investor versus if you're a passive LP in a venture fund. You know, you're never going to meet that, you know, CEO. So I think being available and accessible is where you start, and then the entrepreneur will kind of guide what that support actually entails. So, you know, one of my favorite things to do is make introductions to other VCs that then write million-dollar-plus checks. It happens like 5 times a year, maybe, you know, right? I mean, we're constantly trying. We get ghosted, you all the time, so—
