Angel investing is so huge, there's a 4-hour crash course to teach people how to do it
Angel investing in Silicon Valley is huge right now.
In 2014, there were 2,960 angels who participated in a funding round (and by comparison, there were 822 in 2010).
It's so popular, in fact, that there's a four-hour class in Mountain View, California, that will teach you how to be an angel investor, the New York Times' Mike Isaac reports.
In March, Y Combinator president Sam Altman held a four-hour, invite-only crash course at the seed fund's headquarters to teach new angel investors how to "evaluate founders and their ideas and how angels can be helpful to companies they invest in," Isaac reports. "The event also stressed that angel investing was difficult to do well, and that newcomers should expect to lose money."
Of course, the idea that you can learn all there is to know about angel investing in startups in a mere four hours is literally unbelievable.
In the past several years, big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter have gone public, creating lots of millionaires with money to invest back into small startups. "The total angel scene back when I started in 2006 was 30 or 50 angels, maybe with three to five very active ones," Aydin Senkut, founder and managing director of VC firm Felicis Ventures, told the Times. "Now everybody and their family and their pets who have some money want to get into angel investing."
The influx of angel investor interest in startups can be a blessing and a curse for founders: having a bunch of notable angel investors provides much-needed credibility for young startups. But when a lot of angels invest in a company that's in trouble and there's no lead investor, there's less responsibility on any one investor to help out.
Some founders also say angel investors today are so eager to put their money into startups that they don't do their due diligence by thoroughly reading over deal terms.
This fits into Mark Cuban's theory about what he considers to be a tech bubble forming today about private investments. In a blog post earlier this year, Cuban asserted that today's tech bubble is worse than the dot-com bubble 15 years ago because today's investments in private tech startups lack the liquidity of public market investments.Here's Cuban:You can read the New York Times' full report about angel investing here.