Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Insights and Opinions: Angels Behaving Badly
For our Insights and Opinions section today, we're sharing a piece from Joe Platnick, a member of the Pasadena Angels, who addresses the issue of those--ahem--as***le angels.
In my original Top 10 list of criteria for selecting an angel investor, there were two items that aren't often discussed, but are worth scrutinizing during the fundraising process:
- Honesty and integrity
- Are they respectful of entrepreneurs
If you talk to founders and CEOs that have gone through early-stage fundraising, many will share their personal stories about dealing with as***le angels. In partial support of this, Frank Peters wrote a recent post on the Top10 Lies Angels Tell that contains a few chards of truth. On several occasions I've observed angels (and not members of the Pasadena Angels) publicly berate entrepreneurs. Probably the most memorable was when a member of another angel group looked a founder square in the eyes and told them in an obnoxious manner they weren't CEO material—a rather ironic comment, since this angel had probably spent their working life as a service provider and had never been in an operational role, and especially not one in a startup.
Given all the turmoil and upheaval that's occurred in the Angel community over the past two years, one question that invariably perplexes me: How do as***le angels survive and why isn't there a self-correcting mechanism that purges them from our ecosystem?
Read Joe's entire post in our Insights and Opinions section.