Angel Investor Bloggers

David Beisel (Genuine VC Blog) asked the very interesting question of Where are the Angel Bloggers?

Jeff Clavier (Software Only Blog) added his voice to the question (Angel investor blogs: where are thou ?) and mentioned the names of some angel investor bloggers who are indeed already listed on this Ventureblogs list (in the column to the left of this post).

Which provides an excellent segue into three quick points:

1. Reminder that Ventureblogs is all about being "pointers to blogs and posts by and about venture capitalists, angel investors, and entrepreneurs that provide insight into the venture building and venture funding adventure."

We know that we are still missing many such bloggers, so please let us know (either by adding a trackback or comment to this post or dropping us an email at vblogs@stealthmode.com). Thanks!

2. Our theory on angel investor bloggers is that the overwhelming majority of angel investors want to be able to find the good opportunities without having to be visible themselves - they wish to remain camouflaged in the background so that they are not hassled on a regular basis by the 99.99% of "opportunities" they have no interest in ("to see but not to be seen").

The few angel investors who are visible bloggers tend to be the ones who have already become visible to the public through such things as investing and/or entrepreneurship, so they really couldn't effectively hide in the background even if they tried or wanted to, so that reason not to blog about their angel investing goes away.

Also, while most angels do investing as a sideline and thus are not prepared to get a deluge of calls, emails, and over-the-transom business plans, VCs do it as their primary business and thus usually have the infrastructure, processes, and incentive to be seen and noticed by as many entrepreneurs as possible and are also already publicly visible by the very fact that the are VCs. Furthermore, because of public visibility, VC's have a strong incentive to blog to help further qualify and attract just the specific types of opportunities that are of the most interest to their portfolio goals.

Short version: most angels don't blog about their investing since they try to avoid the hassle of being overly visible. Many enlightened VC's blog since they are already visible anyhow and their blogging can help better attract, screen, and qualify the right opportunities.

In this light, the choices of both groups of investors can be characterized as taking a defensive posture against the often aggressive and pesky hordes of entrepreneurs ;-)

3. Finally, a quick thank you to David and Jeff (and also Jason Caplain of Southeast VC Blog) for their pointers to Ventureblogs.com!

UPDATE: This ties in nicely with Burnham's Beat: Deal Flow Is Dead, Long Live Thesis Driven Investing in that:

1. VC's can use their blogging to clearly and publicly articulate their investing thesis so as to have a higher probability of getting connected with the "right" entrepreneurs, and

2. Most experienced and active angel investors have no reason to blog to get deal flow - as they probably already have their investing thesis and network to find potential ventures in which to invest - meaning that they would tend to invest in what they already know and thus already have the network to privately discover such investment opportunities - and are also most likely not really interested in opportunities outside of that thesis anyhow in that they would not be able to leverage their network and experience in addition to their money so as to increase the probability and magnitude of their ROI.

Comments

[Dave]

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