Angel investing is a burgeoning field with many influential and passionate game-changers that can help transform the industries they throw their support behind. As angel investors identify potential startups who can help make an impact, it’s essential to stay updated on current trends and investment practices from experts who have undergone years of angel investing.
These five books are a helpful starting point and can help anyone seeking to become an angel investor access the best ways to help scale startups.
The Angel Investor’s Handbook: How to Profit from Early-Stage Investing
By Gerald A. Benjamin, Joel B. Margulis, Joel Margulis
Many of today’s investors have turned their focus to early-stage investing in emerging companies. They know how lucrative and exciting funding a start-up venture can be. Smart angel investors often foresee distant but potentially huge returns from pre-IPO companies. Many entrepreneurs are in search of capital and lots of money to be invested. The challenge is, matching the right entrepreneurs with wise investors, so that both can profit.
The book’s authors demonstrate that a crippling pitfall for potential investors is an incomplete understanding of early-stage investing’s complexities. Additionally, the angel capital market often provides few mechanisms for bringing investors and entrepreneurs together, while regulations restrict communication between sophisticated investors and promising new startups. This book offers insights on where the uninitiated start. In this groundbreaking work, they also offer angel investors a hands-on manual for profiting from early-stage, private equity deals. They identify and provide examples on developing investment criteria and fully-rounded game plans, locating lucrative investment opportunities, assessing and managing risk, negotiating favorable deals, securing due diligence, and planning the essential exit strategy.
The Angel Investing: Matching Startup Funds with Startup Companies
By Robert Robinson and Mark Van Osnabrugge
In this helpful guide, Robert Robinson and Mark Van Osnabrugge offer personal interviews, anecdotal evidence and the support of over 300 research studies that show exactly who angel investors are, how they operate and where they can be found.
Robinson is an international management consultant and Van Osnabrugge is an associate professor at Harvard Business School. Together, they identify ten unique characteristics of angel investors, including the advantage of investing with an angel. They also compare various financing options and explain in detail how angels and venture capitalists operate differently. Readers will also find descriptive and proven ways to attract angel investors by providing relevant resources. Their goal is to emphasize how angels provide more funding to more entrepreneurs than any other source, and are some of the most important (though least understood) players in our entrepreneurial landscape today. This book will help you look at the pros and cons of funding types critical to the survival and growth of startup firms.
Impact with Wings: Stories to Inspire and Mobilize Women Angel Investors and Entrepreneurs
By Various Authors
Don’t settle for leaving half of the world’s wealth on the table. In today’s world, women’s capital remains underutilized. Angel investing provides money, human capital, and expertise for start-up and early-stage companies — and it offers profound opportunities for women to impact the future. The various female authors of this book, all seasoned investors in the global investment community, share their insights and stories to inspire new female angel investors.
Noted as an inspirational and actionable book, Impact With Wings is unique in offering the necessary tools and information for evaluating whether angel investing is an appropriate financial asset class for readers. Women who want to secure their previously dormant financial standing or entrepreneurs of either gender who want to understand the huge potential of women’s economic influence should read this book to help educate and inspire.
What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know: An Insider Reveals How to Get Smart Funding for Your Billion Dollar Idea
By Brian Cohen, John Kador
Getting into the head of an angel investor can help you assess if the field is best for you — and how to properly navigate the field. In this terrific book, readers will find advice from a master of the angel investing game, revealing the art and craft of raising angel money. Raising proper funds is about connecting with the right investor and this book wants to help you succeed in doing so.
As a veteran early-stage investor, Brian Cohen knows how to spot a great company destined for success. This remarkable book offers step-by-step guidance for any entrepreneur seeking to launch a product or lucrative new idea into a responsive marketplace. As chairman on the New York Angels board of directors, Cohen is one of the most engaged angel investors in the investment world. As the first investor in Pinterest, he describes exactly what angels want to see, hear, and feel before investing in your enterprise. They want a clear exit strategy before the startup even launches, facts that turn “due” diligence into a reality, authenticity and proof that you understand your consumer.
Cohen offers fresh, sought-after insight into how the most successful angels view due diligence, friends and family money, crowdfunding, team building, scalability, iteration, exit strategies–and much more. Called a once-in-a-lifetime book, it offers a rare glimpse into the minds of people who fund businesses like yours. Both authors offer first-hand accounts in an intensely personal, highly readable journey.
The Invested Investor
By Peter Cowley, Neil Kerber
What do you think of angel investing? Do you see it as much more than putting up the money? Are you willing to take risks, even if you know the chances of success are slim? Do you get inspired by supporting others? Or are you looking for passionate investors who will provide real engagement and expertise along with funding for your company? This book is written for both angels and entrepreneurs who want to understand the possible pitfalls of angel investing and how to avoid them – or at least hinder their impact.
If you hope to help entrepreneurs build successful enterprises, or if you’re an entrepreneur who wants to build a solid relationship with angel investors, this book is a must-read. With insights and anecdotes from many angels and entrepreneurs, the book discusses the failures, successes, and lessons learned the hard way. A very accessible reference book, this book can be read in one sitting and contains guidelines and checklists to help angels and entrepreneurs from their first meeting to hopeful success.