If you’ve been following, I’ve been making some angel investments and a chat with a friend yesterday got me thinking about the bundle.
The investments
There are 37 over 3 years, all relatively small dollar amounts.
These are the six in 2015:
Porchlight – stealth, I think.
Penrose Hill – stealth, possibly.
Verifly – Verisign for drones
Concord – Faster algos through stream processing
BringMeThat – Restaurant food delivery for smaller cities and regions
HireNurture – Builds talent communities for employers to hire better, faster, cheaper.
http://sarva.co lists them all
What they are like
These are all awesome companies with either a) high-profile founders who clearly know what they are doing + A-list investor group or b) strong traction/engineering under-the-radar deals. 50-50. Not that one is to the exclusion of the other but that’s where the two types are centered.
Looking back over the longer list it is very heterogeneous.
Returns
I calculated the cash-on-cash using “mark to market” on the 37 deals listed here at http://sarva.co and found something surprising. On paper the group is worth 2x the amount invested. Some of these are 2.5 years old — so that’s a good rate of return if I could get the cash out. Some of these are less than 1 year old.
I had the chance to sell a few bits here and there, and that has returned some cash which is quite spectacular. So I have received back about 50% of the cash laid out which is cool, but then I re-invested that already, so I have 100% of the cash “at work”.
The funny calculation in all this is simply that these are almost all A round financings. And as a startup founder and builder myself that has been through tons of this, I know an A round ain’t shit. But the A rounds are typically 3-4x markups of the seed investment – so the companies that have gotten past my investment to the A round are typically marked way up.
They probably 2-3x again in a B round but the companies where I got involved in 2013 are only just now getting to that stage.
So in short I haven’t returned any cash back out of the angel vehicle.
Also, only 1 deadpool.
Vanity metrics
I’m pretty amazed to see the VC names these companies have attracted funding from *after* me — Founders Fund, Google, Andreessen, Lux Capital, Formation8, Battery, Kleiner, Lakestar, Khosla. I guess no USV, Bessemer, Accel or Sequoia yet so still something to look forward to on that.