Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000

by Jason Calacanis

Step one, create a spreadsheet of all the co-investors in those ten startups you’ve invested in. There should be about fifty investors from the syndicate and a dozen other investors for each startup. That means you will have a pool of six hundred potential investors you can reach out to, minus duplicates. In your spreadsheet, put the person’s LinkedIn, AngelList, Twitter, and Facebook URLs. Connect with each of them on each of these four critical services. When you connect with them, send them a message that says, “Hey Jason, we’re co-investors in Evan Williams’s startup Twitter.” It will take you a couple of days to do this, but in the process you will learn how other investors present themselves to the world. Step two, make a private Twitter list called “co_investors,” and include all these investors in it. Bookmark that list on your browser and open it once or twice a day, favoriting, retweeting, and replying to your fellow investors’ tweets. Now you’ve started building basic “social currency” with a huge swath of Silicon Valley insiders by doing about a month of work—congratulations, you’re an insider! The next step is to start emailing the top, most interesting investors in this process. They might be the syndicate leads, or they might be people who co-invested with you in a syndicate. Now write them an email or send them a private message on any of the common social networks. Here’s a good template: Hey Jason, we co-invested in Company X together. Do you have time fo...