The Angels Are Back, And This Time They Have a Trade Group
Watch out for the angels: They're dusting off their calculators and starting to get serious.
Angel investors are wealthy individuals who use their own money to help fund start-up companies at a very early stage -- usually after entrepreneurs have already hit up all their friends and family members, but before they move on to venture capitalists. A typical angel investment might be a few hundred thousand dollars, or a 10th of the amount that might be put in later by VCs, who have money from pension funds and the like to work with.
Angels have been around for years, mostly as loose networks of unaffiliated rich folk. In recent years, though, they have started to form angel groups, which are upscale cousins of the investing clubs that were common among 401(k) wage slaves during the 1990s bull market. These groups have names like "Indiana AngelNet " and "Central New York Angels." Most have Web sites, and a few have full-time staffs.
There is even a new trade group, the Angel Capital Association, whose goal is to raise the public's awareness of angel investing (angels complain that VCs get all the glory), as well as help improve the investing decisions of the several hundred angel groups that are members.
The association had a meeting in San Francisco last week, and the crowded ballrooms at the event were evidence that the reputation of angel investing has recovered from the bruising it received during the dot-com crash, when many angels lost their wings.
The sessions revealed that angels in America have all of the A-to-C diversity of the country's wealthy elite. Many groups are made up of retired executives or professionals, while around coastal tech centers you'll find the occasional younger members who did well with their own companies. Some clubs get their business done at brandy-fueled country-club smokers. Others stick to fast-paced working breakfasts with nothing on the menu but pancakes and PowerPoints.
At a typical meeting, a few carefully screened local entrepreneurs present their business plans, and the group asks questions and then votes on whether to invest. Lots of due diligence gets done before and after the vote. The process is slow, since even the busiest angel groups can't invest in more than one or two start-ups a month.
As a basic M.O., angel clubs search out high-growth companies in fields like technology and biotech that might, in a few years, issue stock or get bought. This "return on investment" approach to funding companies is often contrasted with economic-development-style investing, which emphasizes job creation.
The second category deals with restaurants, roofing companies and the like -- stable local employers that put food on the table for many families while lacking spectacular profits or stratospheric growth. Most angel groups won't touch those businesses because they take up too much time and offer too little potential upside for the risk involved. This could become a problem if the local governments that are increasingly working with angels -- one of the trends in evidence at last week's session -- begin to themselves turn away from traditional meat-and-potatoes investing, which often produces the most jobs.
As angel groups and angel networks become more common, will they result in new generations of Googles and Genentechs, or simply lots of me-too junk? No one knows, though already it's apparent that the number of potential angel deals varies from region to region.
Marcus Filipovich, of the Pasadena Angels near Los Angeles, says his group received 500 business plans over its Web site, and that while most were tossed out right away, nearly two dozen ended up being worth serious investigation.
In Little Rock, though, Jeff Stinson, who runs Fund For Arkansas, which recently collected $5.3 million from 48 local investors, says he is having trouble finding good places to spend the money. "There is a lack of quality deals," he frets.
Angel investors say a rule of thumb in their world is that an angel's first deal is always a bad one. Investors suspend tough business judgment in their eagerness to get their oars in the cash flow.
Which raises the surprising fact that no one really knows how well, or how badly, angel investors as a whole actually do. The field has its anecdotal examples of home runs, like the 1998 check for $200,000 that Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote to the co-founders of Google, which became worth nearly $300 million. Such tales have the effect of evening news reports about lottery winners, and keep angels in the game even without hard aggregate data. In fact, the angel association is now attempting to answer the question of cumulative angel profits (or losses) once and for all.
Could you, too, be an angel -- or the recipient of an angel check? The best thing to do is to start at the Web site of the Angel Capital Association. Its URL is angelcapitalassociation.org, though if you couldn't discover that on your own, you have no business being involved in this world in the first place.
天使投资卷土重来
要注意这些“天使”了──他们开始掸去计算器上的灰尘，认真考虑投资方向了。
所谓“天使投资者”指的是用自有资金投资初创公司的富裕的个人投资者。他们往往是创业者求遍亲朋好友，转向风险资本家之前的一个选择。一笔典型的天使投资往往只是区区几十万美元，是风险资本家随后可能投入资金的零头。
天使投资者的存在已经有几年时间了，大部分都是一些富人之间的松散网络。但近几年，他们开始发起“天使团体”，类似于90年代股市大牛市期间工薪阶层中普遍存在的投资俱乐部，只是档次更高一些。这些天使投资集团往往起名为“印第安纳天使网”(Indiana AngelNet)，或者“纽约州中部天使们”(Central New York Angels)等，大多数都推出了自己的网站，但很少有全职员工。
甚至还出现了一个的行业团体：天使资本协会(Angel Capital Association)。协会的目的是增进公众对天使投资的了解（天使投资者们往往抱怨风险资本家的知名度更高），帮助上百个“天使团体”会员改善投资决策。
上周这个协会在旧金山召开会议，宴会厅里人头攒动的热闹景象就表明天使投资正在从网络泡沫破裂的打击中复苏过来，当年的沉重打击曾让不少“天使”折翼。
这次会议表明美国的天使投资者和美国的富人精英一样各不相同。很多天使团体都由退休的企业管理人士或者专业人士组成，但在西海岸科技中心区域的天使团体中，偶然可以看到自己公司发展不错的年轻人也是会员。还有一些天使投资俱乐部，他们的商业决策都是在高档香烟烟熏火燎的气氛中做出的。更有一些团体坚持用快节奏的工作早餐来开会讨论问题，摆在桌上的除了烤薄饼就是PowerPoint文件。
投资者讨论会上，到会的往往是经过仔细筛选的当地创业者，他们来向投资者展示自己的商业计划，回答投资者会员的问题，然后会员们投票决定是否投资。很多的尽职调查都是在投票前后做的。决策过程缓慢冗长，因为即使是业务最繁忙的天使投资团体一个月也往往只能投资一两个创业项目。
天使投资俱乐部往往投资那些科技或生物领域的高成长项目，指望它们在短短几年内上市或者被别的公司收购。这种追求“投资回报”的做法与著重创造就业机会的经济发展型投资截然不同。
除了科技或生物公司，他们看中的下一个领域往往是餐馆和屋顶材料公司等，都是一些业务稳定的当地公司，为千家万户服务，但没有惊人的利润或增长。大多数天使投资团体对这些项目不屑一顾，因为项目考察占用的时间一点不少，可甘冒风险的利润增长空间却不大。
天使投资团体和网络越来越常见，他们是会培养出新一代的Google和Genentech，还是状入你我的芸芸众生呢？没人知道。不过天使投资团体有望投资的项目数量各个地区都不同。
洛杉矶附近Pasadena Angels的马库斯?菲利波维奇(Marcus Filipovich)就说，他参与投资的这个团体从网上收到了500多份商业计划书，很多都是一眼看过就扔掉了，留下来值得认真考虑的大约有二十份。
但在阿肯色州的小石城，负责Fund For Arkansas的杰夫?斯廷森(Jeff Stinson)则说，想找个好项目投资真不容易。他从48位当地投资人那里聚集了530万美元资金，准备投资。
天使投资者的投资第一定律是，第一笔投资总是失败的。对收益的渴望往往让投资者中断了认真的商业决策过程。
不过，天使投资者作为一个整体，他们的业绩到底是好是坏，无人得知。这未免让我们大吃一惊。这个领域有很多轶闻趣事，比如说1998年Sun电子计算机公司(Sun Microsystems, 又名：升阳微电脑)的共同创始人安迪?贝托尔斯海姆(Andy Bechtolsheim)开给Google共同创始人的20万美元支票后来演变成近3亿美元的故事。这些传奇故事和晚间新闻上中了彩票大奖的故事的效果差不多，让天使投资这项业务即使没有确切的数据支撑也生机勃勃地发展著。不过，天使投资协会已经在著手收集数据，想要回答人们的疑问了。
那么，各位读者，您能不能成为一位天使投资者──或者成为接受天使投资的人呢？那你最好登陆天使资本协会的网站：angelcapitalassociation.org去查看一番。
