What’s a typical day like for a full-time angel investor?
There is no such thing as a full-time angel investor (or if there is, I’ve never met one.)
If you mean someone investing mostly other people’s money through a seed fund, they are venture capitalists, and their days are spent like other VCs, meeting with prospective investments, mentoring portfolio companies, raising money from limited partners, negotiating deals, and so forth.
If you mean someone investing his or her own money, such an angel is likely to be investing into between 1 and 10 companies a year (I was doing 15 at my most active). Since the average investment amount per angel per company is about $35,000, you can calculate that using the same 2-3% management fee metric as a venture fund, the opportunity cost of the angel’s time for all those deals would be somewhere between $700 and $10,000 per year. Since all angels are Accredited Investors (which means they’re millionaires if they’re not otherwise employed) it wouldn’t make any sense for them to do this on a full-time basis.
Instead, most angels are either retired, in which case investing is a part-time avocation while they go about doing whatever they enjoy doing in life, or else they are actively running other businesses, organizations or other activities. There’s an old saying “if you want something done in a hurry, give it to a busy man”, and that applies here. Some of the world’s most active angels, such as Yossi Vardi, Reid Hoffman, or even me, all have extremely demanding day jobs, and squeeze angel investing into the nooks and crannies around everything else they do.
For example, I am currently leading the investment rounds in four deals simultaneously (probably some kind of angel record), and here is what my own typical day might look like.
*original post can be found on Quora @ http://www.quora.com/David-S-Rose/answers *
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