A marked increase in the number of angel investors joining the ecosystem has led to a problem of plenty for many angel networks. Most of them boast of having hundreds if not thousands of investors spread across the globe. The problem of too much capital chasing too few deals led to a drop in the quality of deals that were/are getting funded by the networks. I wrote about the ills of investments bankers mongering around as angel networks in a post earlier this year called “Angel Investor Networks in India are Dead”. The other major issues that this problem of too much capital in a single angel network have led to are – oversubscription, pro-ration and low investor participation post-investment.  I strongly believe that founders that have made a deal with a large group of passive angel investors have made a terrible… terrible mistake.

This defeats the entire purpose of raising an angel round, which is to get the “value adds” that the angel investor group will provide i.e. help in business development, recruiting, guidance, sales & marketing and so on. A significant factor that motivates investors to pitch in this help is ensuring that each angel investor has enough “skin in the game” to be obliged to invest their time in addition to the money they’ve put in.  

However, due to a large number of angel investors in the ecosystem and lack of good deals, there are situations where active angel investors have to reduce their commitments to accommodate the neuvo angels. While I am sure that this is important for the ecosystem, it is truly detrimental for the startup because a lower investment amount reduces the excitement of the active angel investors to work with the entrepreneur.  

A personal example from my angel investment days is a company where I had committed 15 lakhs (~$25,000) in the seed round but got paripassu’d down to the awesome figure of Rs. 95,000 (~$1500) to accommodate 50 odd other investors that were all committing sub 5 lakh amounts. Since I usually calculate a 3x multiple in the follow-on round, the company should be worth at least 45 lakhs in the new round for me to be interested in putting in my time to work with them. In this case, the startup would have to deliver a 45x return in the next round itself to keep me interested, a figure that just isn’t plausible. Therefore, it was a struggle to convince me and my team to help this startup, because a competing investment where we could invest 15 lakhs would just make a better return for our time.  I am not in any way endorsing that founders reject passive angel money as long as it is a decent amount per angel, but it is extremely important that the founders set aside a large chunk of equity to be taken up by active & prominent angels with decent sized checks that will keep them motivated them to stay engaged.  

Otherwise, founders might realize that along with their company’s equity they have diluted their investor’s interest in it.

64/2018