When I started angel investing in 2021, one of my biggest mistakes I made was applying traditional fundamental analysis to early-stage investing. Seemed smart at the time but most of those checks I wrote went to zero.
Wrote five small $5k checks then, nothing serious. Three of them went to zero. One returned my money while the last one appreciated a bit, but still has no clear path to any liquidity event.
At the time, I worked in a private investment firm with an investment process closer to PE, so naturally, that shaped how I approached investing. I was trying to analyze startups like mature businesses. Crunching numbers that, frankly, had very little bearing on the true fundamentals of the opportunity. Not saying crunching numbers aren’t great but heavy reliance shouldn’t be placed on them esp at the early stage where a company is still trying to find its bearing.
2024 I came back for round 2 and went down the rabbit hole to gather insights from the OGs. Watched almost every Olumide Soyombo, Kola Aina, and Iyin Aboyeji video I could find on the internet, studying how they approached startup investing and a recurring theme I noticed was that their early-stage investments thesis were mostly driven by qualitative judgment. Things like Founder quality, market insight, distribution, Industry direction etc and the potential for that industry to attract capital for future liquidity were the recurring theme I noticed.
While I was busy building spreadsheets for businesses too early to be properly gauged that way, the prolific guys already knew the right questions to ask. Sometimes, they had already decided they wanted exposure to a specific sector and were simply looking for the right operator to back.
In 2024, I refined my philosophy and came back for round two.
Still nowhere near as prolific as the OGs, but the ROIC on my portfolio so far tells me one thing clearly that I’ve definitely gotten better at this 😃