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

by Jason Calacanis

get rich by taking intelligent risks.

Important people have the ability to turn off their phones because the world can wait for them. People who are not important have to react to their phones and be at the mercy of people pinging them. If you haven’t figured this out in life yet, it’s okay. It took me a while to figure this out.

Elon Musk built SpaceX because he wanted a backup plan for humanity. Elon’s earlier idea, that no one knows about, was to put a series of greenhouses in space to back up the biosphere—just like the Bruce Dern movie Silent Running—which, as an interesting aside, came out five years before Star Wars and featured drones that were an inspiration for R2-D2.

A first-time founder with an idea written on the back of a napkin is, generally speaking, not deserving of your funding. If you’re a first-time founder, it is your job to build a functioning prototype, or MVP, and hopefully run a beta test.